Xbox Asplode!

It’d be easy enough, I suppose, to blame the tears that blurred my eyes on the abrasive smoke cloud teeming down the front of my entertainment center and across my shoulders as I stood doubled over, staring at the Xbox in horror. Or, I could assuredly find the piquant, carcinogenic wallop of refried circuitry that I tasted at the back of my ears at fault. Human biology had given me a couple of acceptable outs, should I choose to employ them.

But that, dear readers, would be lying.

No, long after the smoke had drifted out through the hastily thrown open windows into the post-midnight air, and once the DNA damage had been inflicted, I still stood there, sniveling, my yanked-out power cord wilting flaccid in my hand.

The Xbox was dead. I had lost a friend.

The signs of imminent demise had been there for a while, though only now could I accept them for what they were. The Ivory application of denial leaves life’s little tragedies 99.44 percent pure, and it’s easy to ignore the filthy tub when you are deliberately focusing on the spectacle of the floating soap. But who was I kidding? The Xbox had been sounding and stinking like a flatulent dog for a while. It’d sometimes take two or three tries to get the thing going at all, and there was no guarantee that it then wouldn’t crap out in the middle of things. But I ignored the popping and the wheezing; the burning and the sparking; and told myself everything was going to be alright. It had to be. I was a good person.

I had made it through the ‘Thompson Dirty Disk Debacle’ with the Xbox already; that was hard enough to take. Microsoft’s company ethos really revealed itself on that one, though, didn’t it? Let’s design a product with an inherent flaw in the dvd-drive, and then, when it starts to fail, display a message that blames everything on the user:

'It’s your fault, you there staring at the screen. You are dirty. Dirty! '

This problem, though, hit me on a more visceral level. How could it not, when you are treated to a suddenly violent pyrotechnic display performed on wooden furniture when your wife and child sleep soundly upstairs? Yow! The Xbox had been mentioned in many violent news stories of late; headline writers cleverly insinuating that the demonic green box inspired friends to bludgeon friends with baseball bats and such. Had I been wrong in assuming such insinuations to be tripe?

XBOX torches house, three dead!

I could see the headline now. I felt sick.

If the thing was indeed retributively sentient, I guess some people would say I’d have it coming, forcing the laser’s attention on hours and hours of playing All-Star Baseball and State of Emergency. A jury probably wouldn’t even convict if word of that treatment got out.

Still, evil intentions aside, I wanted the thing back. I promised the machine I’d be good to it, playing only EGM gold games, and keeping the wife’s rentals of things like ‘13 going on 30’ far, far away. Do you want new components? I’ll buy you new components!

And actually, that was all that it needed.

I can’t give proper credit because I don’t know where I first read this, but it seems that early versions of the Xbox, in addition to having the dirty disk problem, also had a shoddy power supply unit. The psu’s in many boxes are supported only by solder. Any moderate plugging and unplugging of the system from the back is likely to cause the joints to crack and spark, ultimately causing the supply, and thus the system, to fail. I had been guilty of the ole 'in-and-out', as I routinely bring the machine upstairs and then down, taking it to my exercise room to use as I bike, then back to the living room where I do my late night gaming. Sure enough, that was my problem, and eventually the power supply consumed itself it a blaze of glory.

Luckily, because this story was not completely unknown, I found a few people saying that the problem could be easily resolved by buying a replacement PSU, and doing a simple component swap. I found this guy on eBay, and I figured for $20 (Watch the $10 shipping) it was worth a shot. The part came within a week.

An excellent site showed me how to crack open the Xbox, and in no time, I removed the obviously crisp old power unit, replacing it with the new. If you are comfortable enough with doing things like adding a new hard disk or memory to your pc, then this will be a piece of cake. In less than ten minutes, I had the new PSU installed, and the Xbox hooked back up to the TV.

I powered it up, and it worked like a charm, not a single saved game lost.

Happily, I pedaled my way through an hour and a half of All-Star Baseball, blithely ignoring promises made during a darker, more desperate hour.

Half the promises, anyway. The other half still comes in handy:

“Sorry dear, we just can’t watch 'Win a Date with Tad Hamilton'. We’ll die horribly in our sleep.”