XBox 360 not fit for purpose?

[csc2ya]

I'm wondering whether the sale of goods act would apply to this. I've got an xbox 360 core system that I purchased just after launch (early 2006 I believe).

 

I've spent quite a lot on the system (games, accessories, xbox live gold membership), and naturally, I expected it to last a long time.

 

However, today when I was trying to get my external harddrive working on it to store content, it locked up. I then rebooted it, and got the red ring of death (3 segments on the ring of light round the power button flashing, and doesn't get as far as initializing the video card etc). I've tried the basic things that the support site says to try (try another plug socket etc), and it will not boot at all (I don't get an error on the screen either).

 

I phoned microsoft to find out about getting it repaired, and as it's out of warranty, they want £100 to repair it. I'm unemployed, and can't afford that, but that isn't the reason I don't want to pay. Microsoft have known about this problem more or less since it was released, and while they extended the warranty to 3 years for this problem, in my and many other poeple's opinions the xbox 360 could be considered not fit for purpose.

 

I've looked up the length of time that this would apply for, and it appears to be 6 years from the date of purchase.

 

I'm thinking about trying to use that to get it sorted out free of charge, but I purchased it from woolworths, which is no longer trading, and I paid cash, so it's not as if I can get my credit card company to sort it out.

 

Does anyone know what I would do in this situation? I also no longer have a copy of the reciept (it faded so much it wasn't readable after 3 years), but I know microsoft would have a record of the date it was purchased from when I registered it online.

[kiptower]

its not 6 years for everything you buy, sad to say

 

and "not fit for purpose" would be very very hard to prove being about 4 years old

[what_todo]

have a look at you tube there seem to lots of video on how to fix the 3 red rings of death

[SOD'EM]

Woolworths are still trading online. You can contact them via this link with your problem.

 

Contact

 

I would suggest mentioning the Sales Of Goods Act and let them know you are considering writing to the Office Of Fair Trading/Trading Standards. They may be sympathetic even though it is near 4 years old.

 

Worth a try I suppose.

[Conniff]

That's not the same Woolworths that was in the High St and owned by Kingfisher. The internet Woolies is owned by Shop Direct Group.

[loopinlouie]

My sons xbox died due to the three rings of death. Due to me being ill we never got to sending it off and it was too late to repair it, my fault. Anyhow told son to give it one more try and turn it on and it thankfully came back to life from previous rings of death.

 

Its been working ever since. Worth a try, leave if for a few days and go back to it;)

[The Chez]

I've been told by a tech expert in my local computer repair shop that this 'error' is caused by some pins that attatch the graphics card to the main board, which are made out of PLASTIC of all things, melt, and the two pieces of hardware land up touching each other. It can be resolved by soldering metal pins in to replace the plastic ones. This can be done at a small computer/console repairs shop. The one in my town does it for about £30, much better than £100! £100 is a rip off and I would advise against sending it off to Microsoft.

 

They will no doubt trump up the repairs that actualy need doing, and you'll pay postage & shipping probably on top of the actualy repair fee.

 

A small shop should be able to fix this at a more reasonable cost.

[yetikid234]

To be honest, there is several causes for the ring of death,

you here the "wrap it in a towel trick" which I don't recommend because even if occasionally it works it can be dangerous. But the basic idea behind it is to re-overheat the machine and it magically starts working again. If you do choose to do this, make sure you take care. I'm only telling you this from past experiences and most of the time it has worked.

[nicolee2931]

The most common cause of RROD is the heat transfer paste betwen the heatsink and the GPU/CPU processors.

 

Dead easy fix if you know what you are doing... take xbox apart, remove motherboard from internal casing, remove the x-clamps, remove heatsink.

 

Remove the old heat transfer paste from heatsink base, remove transfer paste from GPU/CPU. Apply Arctic Silver heat transfer paste to cleaned GPU/CPU attach heatsink using brass M6 bolts and disregard x-clamps. Reassemble xbox as reverse dis-assembly.

 

Upon powering the xbox the box will RROD again but ignore leave powered on for 20-30 minutes. Power off leave for 10 minutes, power on and if all went to plan on assembly you now have a working xbox which should not suffer RROD again.

 

There is a video on the net if you look for it in the usual places. I have fixed loads including 2 of my own.