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[OomphH]

My 9 months old XBox started to freeze while downloading the saint rows demo about a week ago.

Stupid me, opened the box about 6-7 months ago because I wanted to see if I could do something about the noisy fans. So any Microsoft repairs or warranty is out of the question for me. I have talked to MS support and they told me that they wouldn't touch the box as it no longer has the sticker on it.

It usually locks up before it even gets to the dashboard, usually while displaying the XBox 360 logo.
But sometimes a get into the dashboard and can start a demo or something, but then it will freeze before the game really gets started.

I have discovered that if I start it directly to Media Center mode by pressing the green media center button on the remote when the box is in power off mode, then it almost always works.
One or two times it has frozen after something like 10-20 seconds after the Media Center GUI has started, but it seems that if it gets past this it can stay in Media Center mode for hours, never seen that it has frozen while watching streamed movies, recorded content or live tv.

Has anyone else experienced that it fails in all else than media center mode? I fear that this is just the beginning and that shortly also media center will start freezing, but I am still hoping.
I can live without the games (don't play that often anyway), but I want my media center (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

As it always more or less immediately freeze if it does freeze I don't think that overheating can be the case with my box. It simply can't overheat that fast I think. And it doesn't make sense as the Media center functions can run for hours.
So I belive arctic silver won't help me much.
I think that some bad soldering of some components seems much more likely.
Could it be the GPU? Maybe that is not used as much for running Media Center as for playing games?
Or RAM chips?

Also read that someone had fixed their box by resoldering the video connector, but that couldn't be the case for me as there's a difference between games and media center, or could it?

I am considering the heat gun procedure, but does it work for more than a few days?
I've read many posts describing this, and very few that have reported a more permanent fix.

[hignaki]

Well, it could never hurt resoldering the video connector, or doing the heatgun trick.


Personally, I'm starting to believe that 0102 is caused by any set of random problems that are linked to a cracked PCB.  Remember, that motherboard is a multi-layer PCB, and any bending while installing could crack inner connections.  That would also explain why the heatgun trick works either temporarily or permanently.  For some problems, it would heat up, remelt, and expand connections.  But over time those cool and re-crack or seperate again (as would be the problem for a cracked PCB layer).  For the others that are simply a cracked surface solder connection, it remelts the connection, giving it a generally "permanent" fix.

0102 is sounding like less of a "RAM error" (as it was originally reported to be), and more of a "generally fuxxored hardware/we don't know WTF is wrong" error.

[nitussi]

That explains it then!

These peice of shit 360's have cooling problems.

Its that flimsy GPU heatsink, it gets way to hot, and it does not have enough cooling. Someone needs to come up with a replacement that has a copper base and a heat pipe with fins that corners around directly in front of both fans. M$ retards put way to much attention on their precious CPU and forgot about the GPU. If you look at the air duct, you will notice that 70% of the air is being sucked through the CPU. To prove it, let your system run for about an hour opened(remove the plastic sides), then touch the bottom where it is all metal. Notice how the CPU is hot to the touch, but the GPU is extremely hot to the touch.  Just as hot as when I did the heat gun fix if not hoter, this is why most of the time the heat gun fix is temporary. Now if you let the system cool for a bit, you will see that it is cool up under the CPU but still very hot uder the GPU.

Ive repaired 15 xbox360's with the heat gun fix and 9 of them I had to reheat to a higher temperature within a week of working. Im waiting on returns to see if the higher temperature fix work.

As you can see I repair systems and one of the main reasons why Sony sucks is because the Ps2 would break(on purpose of course). Now that I see that the heat gun fix repaired 100% of the 360's that I had(if only temporarily), M$ can kiss my ass and now Im a Wii fanboy.

[OomphH]

Seems that I might have fixed the box.

I opened the box (my plan was to heat gun it) and discovered that there was a large blob of thermal paste on one of the small chips on top of the GPU, just beside the GPU die. The small chip was almost covered in thermal paste. I washed this off, applied some new paste from an old tube I had and reassembled the box, and now it works!!!

I can play games and use the media center extender again.
I haven't been able to play games on the box for some weeks now and yesterday it completely stopped working. I was not able to start it at all, only ROL and error code 0102.
After the removal of the goop it worked.

I guess it also simply could be that I have pressed the GPU in place when cleaning it and that it will soon stop working again, time will show I guess.....

[OomphH]

It wasn't fixed. Guess the goop wasn't conductive after all.

I tried pushing and cleaning the gpu again, but this time nothing worked, except the heat gun which I finally tried.

Seems that it is bad connections as heat gun procedure seems to have fix it, if only temporary, for the moment it works. Has been working for about an hour now.