Over the weekend I had some lack of video from my XBox360. Nothing that some heat couldn’t fix. Apparently most problems with the Xbox360 are fixed by that which kills PCs – heat.

I have an XBox360, which is one of those that was born with bugs and “genetic” issue – meaning an early version – one from the early ones, made before the red ring of death became evident  and all the various versions started to come out. Luckily, I don’t abuse and rarely spend massive amount of hours playing it, thus I don’t have very many problem with it! Other than the occasional screen flicker and the constant refusal of the DVD-Rom tray to actually stay closed after attempting to close it. Apparently the DVD drive gets a bad taste from DVD discs and refuses to work with them. HAHA. My solution for the latter is to place my thumb on the drive tray and prevent it from coming back out, then pushing the open/close button again!!

This past weekend I experienced something new – the XBox booted fine and there was audio, but no video. The digital TV detected an active video source, but there was no picture. At first I was going to disassemble the XBox to look for problem myself, because the warranty had expired a long time ago. But then I decided to wait for Monday and call Microsoft and possibly sent it back.

After researching the problem in the global knowledge fix and repair database, i.e. the Internet, I was able to determined that 1) it might not be worth the money spend to sent it in for repair, and 2) the issue could be related to the heat sync on the video chip. Something about the x-clamp (see x-clamp fix video at the end of the post). A problem which is most commonly fixed by wrapping the Xbox in a towel causing it to overheat. I again considered taking it apart and performing the x-clam fix, because I wasn’t willing to wrap the XBox in something to cause it to overheat and possibly cause heat damage to other components. Before proceeding, I simply opted out to just turn it on and let it run heat up. I’ve noticed how hot it can get! About 20 minutes later I came back to check on it. I turned the XBox off and back on. Voila, there was video again! Problem fixed.

Now if that darn DVD-drive tray could stay closed, it would be great.