Whilst my dying 360 gently steers me towards Nintendo or Sony

OE, I tried it with several different cables, several different TV units (LCD, my portable & my daughters TV) and eventually the Dell LCD monitor (which is the image displayed here). The washing up liquid effect was also eventually replaced with red lines, then the entire screen would go green and finally conk out altogether! Sometimes the 360 failed to boot up with any video at all, however NO red lights! If it's down to the Spring update then it shafted my 360 right and proper.

How weird.

 

Yeah, but the actual faulty one is still here lol - so we can test it out tonight ;-)

 

I used the old "ltrig rtrig x y lbump rbump x x left left" effort in system blade to clear the unit of updates (atleast this is what I had read elsewhere).

First 2 power up attempts and NO video output other than little (green) dots running across the screen top to bottom in wavy lines.

Third power up, it booted...held video for 10second in normal (and I thought YES!), but then it went to orange, now it goes to normal and not it's gone to green. So, we are getting every variety of Fairy Washing up liquid tonight using composite out.

However, I am going to persist and see what happens if I run the unit for a while. I'll also try another TV (this is currently my ancient portable) and different cables (I bought a few spares).

 

19:10pm - trying Gears of War to heat the system up

 

Mine checks out as

2 x CRT TV's (Sony / Samsung)
1 x Sharp LCD TV
1 x Dell LCD monitor

1 LCD TV no longer likes VGA, composite or SCART
2 LCD Monitor only accepts VGA, but no video or goes green.
1 CRT no longer likes composite, but accepts SCART
2 CRT no longer likes composite, but accepts SCART

What did your friend use the composite on, CRT or LCD?

 

19:33pm - The image has held throughout the time I have been messing around using SCART only. All other signals either immediately show up green or the video signal disappears on power up.

Well, I guess I can enjoy the fact I bought another machine for £40 until MS sort this one.

Looks like it's worth clearing out the Spring update!

 

At least until those red lights start shining!

 

Just attempted to clear the console of updates again, swapped from SCART to composite before doing so. The screen went green, but I booted up after the thing I posted below and the problem appears to be fixed on composite. I'll try again on LCD later on.

It's taken three attempts to sort it via clearing the updates, but it has worked!

I'm surprised that MS didn't mention on Sunday that there were issues (unless they have not been aware) but were happy to take £80 for a new motherboard.

Seriously, many thanks to OE for pointing this out. I immediately thought the GPU / Heatsinking must be at the bottom of it.

So, as I mentioned before try the following and be prepared to try it again and again. It might initially kill your video output, but it came back on SCART, then to composite.

ltrig rtrig x y lbump rbump x x left left

 

Just tried the 360 on the LCD. It now accepts all forms of input. OE, let your friend know and thanks for the heads up. :clap: Seriously though it did NOT clear the backlog of updates immediately. He may have to try it a few times.

...all I have to do now is contact the new owner who bought the faulty unit and let him know the good news...

I might ask if he can cancel his cheque OH:

 

Whilst doing all this I removed both the hdd & the memory card. They in no way have been affected by any of this.

So, when I did the maintenance and deleted all the updates from cache I didn't think my game saves would be affected.

Going into GoW we discovered we were right back at the beginning. The only thing we did was refuse the update, but that surely shouldn't affect things one way or the other.

Does anyone know whether clearing cache affects any aspect of game saves? Surely not?

 

good news parris! (not on the game saves situation though! D'oh!)

So, will you be investing in more Fairy Liquid Xbox's???

 

It's one to keep and eye on. I also had another issue pointed out to me last night. MS have started to block users from logging onto Live if they've had their firmware (cough!) tampered with. So, not only are you unable to access live, but there is currently no way round it as it's not your Gamertag that gets banned, it's the 360's unique ID! A new 360 would be required, unless someone knows a means of sorting it out.

Just in time for the Halo 3 trials :fresh:

 

Excellent news!

...I'll see if his console responds to 'maintenance' in the same manner, I'll post the results shortly after.

 

The first time you update the system it might give you the following output. Of course, if like me you have never done this before you might cr*p yourself and think "Well, I just bust it then!" so here is the screen you are presented with instead of it actually booting up. Look hard enough (hopefully the quality is good enough) and you'll see it is a screen filled with moving green dots. <Note the green arrow in the box on the screen are output by Sony obviously!>



The output via SCART still worked, but actually the image degraded on boot up the second time and you don't just have green liquid effect, you now also have what looks like red lines moving across the screen horizontally.



After the 4th attempt it went back to normal across all outputs.

As SCART was the only output to funtion properly throughout, I am wondering what will happen to US consoles that this happens to if SCART isn't an option?

 

P.S. I seriously suggest to keep one of these old Sony CRT monitors kicking around. It's a TV, but has been a brilliant test system for about 15yrs now. Whenever I need to find an RF signal or whatever from retro stuff it invariably finds it. £10 from a flea market would probably be deemed too much lol

 

strangely enough the same error has occured on the same machine after several weeks of it being ok. Guess this solution may only be a temporary fix.

 

What are the manufacture dates on your dead 360s?

It seems 360s made a year ago don't seem to have problems (July 2006 on word)

SOme 360s have Faulty Disc drives for that matter most of the original XBOX had faulty Drives.

 

This was a launch edition, but all the parts have slowly been swapped out by MS so the original parts are now gone. It's just the graphic output. No red ring of death, nothing flashing. It boots up without any video output and you can hear the swoosh of the system blades if you hook up a controller.

 

Yeah that's your problem. I tend not to belive people when they say their newer systems died then again My 360 red ringed the day I got it.

Yeah it looks like your 360 is suffering from a GPU problem. which is also farily common in older systems.

You could have it fixed a 3rd or 4th time or you could cut your losses and pick up a new system.

Avoid Launch Systems like the plague.

 

Parris, I had an "earlier" 360 system. It was from about 1 year ago. It suffered a similar pattern of problems. It would freeze and do weird stuff randomly after several months. But strangely it was go away and I'd go a week or two with no problems. Then with no warning it would start freezing up like crazy again. It would go to the red ring of death too. Then it would revert and be ok. Eventually it went red and didn't come back and I exchanged it for a brand new unit which I have now.

It's just shitty manufacturing or a bad internal design. It's easy to get pissed off at it, but you definitely still want a 360, you just don't want the bullshit with it. If my 360 died, I'd just get another. It's not like Wii or PS3 has to offer what I want.