So I've been playing New Vegas for almost a year now, and I've played Fallout: 3 for well over one, and just a few months ago my Xbox.... Failed. I'd been playing the game for a really long time every day (I've literally got nothing better to do with every single one of my friends living at a minimum at 20 miles away, okay?), and my console has held out perfectly for well over 2 years. But just recently, and this was even after the update, my Xbox just failed. I'm talking about the E-74 problem here (PS3 lovers laugh away). And then I called Microsoft to tell them my console had been bricked, which turned out to be over $100. So then I found out about these guys in Pensylvania that specified in my problem and said they'd put a "better" fan to replace my Xbox, all at the expense of $50. I don't know if bigger means better for them, but that stupid fan was bigger and LOUDER, and it pretty much made my Xbox even worse than it was before. I sent it into them 3 TIMES, after every single one of them only lasted about a month. Actually, the last time I sent it in was when it lasted about a week. Until recently when I just got it back, IT DOESN'T WORK!!! Well, I mean it does, but when I got it there was pretty much a free "uncapabiliaty feature" that came free of charge with those guys' [censored] repair and maintanence. I couldn't play any of my disks for about a month because there was something wrong with the ventilation, and I have a a pretty good idea who caused that...


Anyone have any stories like that?

Well, sort of, I build my own PCs, it makes it easier to send it back to the manufacturer but frankly I doubt his competence.

I'm impressed you've playing F:NV for almost a year, it only came out at the end of October!

Almost a year? What?

almost a year do xbox users age twice as fast?

New Vegas has barely been out Half A Year.

lol. Yah but i have an xbox and i had this problem until i got the newer ones of last year or so and they dont have those problems anymore.

You probably could have fixed the xbox yourself for about 5 bucks.

Really i would love hear how to do this. And dont say to smash it with a 5 dollar hammer.

X-clamp fix. It's not 110% sure to work on every single console but it elliminates the 360's main design fault and it has a pretty impressive success rate.

It's what most "repair" "companies" do aswell. The rest probably do the equivalent of the towel trick and then upgrade the cooling (lol)

In a nutshell what happens is the the combination of crappy solder and wimpy cooling on the GPU cause some of the solder joints to crack. On top of it all the stock heatsink's retention thingy (the "x-clamp") warps the motherboard thus pulling it away from the GPU.

What you do is you replace the stock retainers (x-clamps) with screws and nuts to get rid of the warping and then overheat the GPU after reassembly, hopefully causing the solder joints to reflow.

Wow thats pretty legit.

had to stop reading here on principle.

that happend with my 360 my stupid mum took it to a pc repair shop, had to buy a new one

Hahaha guys, I meant to say I'd been playing Fallout in general for almost a year total. Sorry for the confusion :facepalm:

I've been playing New Vegas for five years now. I'm serious. :spotted owl:

Alright, now that's just mean.

That's exactly what caused the PS3's YLOD issue. Except it was the PSU that caused the heating. They just have to fit those machines in such small cases that it doesn't allow proper cooling :shrug: