Problems I’ve noticed over the last month (I bought it at CostCo back in May of '07, I believe):
-Disk drive has problems opening (whether empty or not) if the unit is standing upright.
-Freezing while using various game disks or dvds, often not able to read either of them at all. The dashboard interface just says “Reading” or “Open Tray”.
It doesn’t seem to be making as much fan noise as it did when we first bought it, but I could just be more used to it now. But maybe an internal fan blew?
It is (and always has been) “well ventilated”, and I’ve got an external fan pointed at it now.
I haven’t even tried to play games on it for a few weeks, and the dvds seem to work better if I let it rest for a while. I’ve never gotten any of the “three red lights” behavior that they describe with the extended warranty.
It is, however, extremely annoying. Our old xbox in the bedroom has been acting up too. We rely on both of them as our only dvd players.
Mine’s been a workhorse. It sometimes suffers from the CD tray not wanting to open again without poking at it, but all in all, it’s good.
A buddy of mine has, as of yesterday morning, gone through his 9th.
I’ve experienced the problem with the disc tray not opening while the unit is upright also. My would occasionally freeze also but after buying a DVD drive cleaner that problem has gone away.
The only other I have is the drive volume. That thing sounds like a freaking 777 taking off whenever the drive is spinning, which is all the time. I’m thinking my drive may be defective.
First one I got suffered from rrod (red ring of death, isn’t it nice that it’s so popular we can use abbreviations?) out of the box.
My replacement was fine for about 18 months, but it’s having the occasional discread error if it’s trying to find data from another section. Those plasmid movies in Bioshock seems to have a 1-5% chance of causing it.
We also have the door opening issue (push in on the lower edge. It sounds counterintuitive, but my son explained it’s like a dresser drawer that gets opened crookedly - you’ve got to shove the too-far-out end back in before sliding the whole thing out evenly) and yeah, that fan is LOUD. Generally it’s not a problem over the volume of the game or movie, but it’s a bit shocking when I turn it on.
It’s his baby, so he certainly doesn’t mistreat them. He’d get pissed at me if I pushed the CD tray closed, instead of hitting the button to do so.
Yeah, I detect a Halo 3 thread coming over the horizon…I think my friends list is going to change from a pleasant potpourri of games, to everyone playing that when it releases.
We’ve had to send ours in twice. I don’t remember exactly what the problems were since I don’t play it very often. The first time we were sent a different unit and it worked fine for a while. Then it began to have problems too so my husband called and was told it would cost him $140 to have it repaired. He negotiated that down to $70. A couple of months later he received a reimbursement check for $70.
I’ve had mine since April and the tray occasionally makes a bit of a grinding noise when opening but it’s opened every time. A few games freeze the system occasionally and I have to power it down and back up but I always chalked that up to the fact that I buy mostly used games.
I don’t really care how much noise it makes or that the tray is fussy, as long as it works. I can’t help but think that the problems we’ve been having with both the old-school xbox and the 360 are heat related somehow. The worst of the problems with both of them seemed to come to a head during a hot spell that lasted a couple of weeks. We don’t have AC at our house, and temperatures were up in the mid 90s.
I’ve been pretty lucky in that my machine hasn’t given me any problems since I bought it. To be fair, though, on average I only use it a couple of hours every few weeks - not enough to really put it through its paces.
Hijack - I’m prepping for Halo 3 by playing Halo and Halo 2 over again, only this time on the Xbox 360. Does anyone know how to switch between plasma grenades and frag grenades using Xbox 360 controllers? The new controllers are missing the button on the old controllers that used to do this.
Those long buttons you can press with your index fingers just above the triggers map to the old black (grenade) and white buttons. At least they do in Half-Life 2, which is the only old Xbox game I’ve tried so far on a 360.
I’m about to run out to get a torx 10 screwdriver, as I’ve gotten as far as I can without one. There is A LOT of dust and gunk everywhere. The fan blades that I can see are totally covered. We live up in the mountains with no AC, and have had our windows open using box fans to pull in air from the outside as much as possible. And we have 6 pets in the house.
While maneuvering it to take it apart, I can here that something tiny is rattling around, but I don’t know if it is a screw or what. Hopefully I can find the little bit and blow off as much of the dirt as possible with some canned air and get it back into a more functional state without paying the piper for voiding my warranty. :dubious:
The little rattle seems to be in the disk drive somewhere. I’ve stripped down as far as I dare and blown off all of the visible dust. crosses fingers and puts it back together
