Well today Sarah turned on the Xbox 360 and got the infamous ring of death. It has been almost two years since we got the 360, so I was hoping we would avoid it. My warranty is already voided, so sending it to Microsoft was out of the question. I looked up the error code and found out it was related to the GPU. I also found out that whoever applied many of the heat sinks left the little tin foil strip attached that covered the paste, so it basically wasn’t conducting the heat at all. Luckily I found a fix on the great internet. I followed the tutorial on the X-Clamp replacement found at http://360hax.com/page.php?9. It took me most of the evening including a trip to Lowes for the necessary tools, but as of 11:20 tonight it has been running for more than 30 minutes just like normal. Longer than it ever has during the day today. Hopefully it keeps working. I might look into an attachment fan.
