I am sure we all know the RROD. Question is about the refurbs MS sells. What do they do to them? Do they rework the boards? Do they just reflow them? Do they simply throw in a new board and reset the dvd drive info? Afaik rrod fixes don't really work well, so what is ms doing that they are willing to give a 120 day warranty on them.
The refurb units I have seem to suggest that they do reflow them and replace any chips that are faulty. They are still as rubbish thou.
Didn't they just put them back together in working condition and send it to another user as a replacement unit?
They reprocess them using a third party. The consoles are stripped down and salvaged for parts. Some boards are re-flowed, some are trashed. Mostly the components are reused. * This is assuming they have passed through the repair center as beyond a quick repair.
As I understand the entire XBL repair Center is staffed with Alchemists that cast some sort of spell upon the dead 360s to make them work again.
It's a complete crapshoot. First console (Xenon) lasted 20 months. RRoD -> refurb #1. Refurb #1 lasted 5 weeks (I believe that was a Xenon as well). RRoD -> refurb #2. Refurb #2 (IIRC, another Xenon?) lasts a few months until the DVD craps out. Second retail purchase (Falcon) has been good so far.
Once I repaired a 360 that had apparently been sent into Microsoft 5 times for the RRoD and heating issues. I wonder if they got the same console back or just got faulty Xenon's one after another. I remember looking it over to see what Microsoft had done to the old Xenon and iirc, they added a small heatsink to the board. Other than that heatsink, I recall seeing nothing new on the unreliable motherboard.
I get so many requests to do RROD repairs. I just stopped doing them. It's not worth the trouble if even MS' repairs don't fix it for more than a number of weeks. I was tired of getting them back in my hands. So in this case, I say no to refurbs. However, my original Xbox was a factory refurb and it has slayed for years.
Every single box I received back was another unit completely - They simply replaced it with another one. First one was a little shady and looked like it had been in someones house (scratched, etc). When that died, they sent me a brand new unit (born within a month of me receiving it) My old unit suddenly had HDMI out. Whoo hoo.
