XBox 360 Cake like Julia Child would make

I have had to recently do surgery, of sorts, on my Xbox to keep the damned thing running a few days ago.

I got one of the red lights of death last week and have been battling with it since then.

I believe I have it in order. At first I just tore most of the body panels off with my bare hands and then punched the inner metal casing it as hard as I could.

I worked for a computer technician for several years, so you can believe me when I say it was completely at diagnostic measure...or not. I was actually just frustrated because they use those stupid star bits instead of red blooded American bolts, because they hate every guy that thinks he can fix his own shit.

But it worked! I was able to bask in sweet pixelated entertainment for about a day.

I researched the problem a bit, after remember I actually have a set of those stupid star bits, and found it was a solder issue with one of the processors and could be fixed easily with a soldering iron or a heat gun. But I really don't have either of those. So I baked it in the oven.

Here is my recipe, should you be in this position. First, start from the mental position that it is broken already. So anything you try is purely a shot from the other end of the court.

Take everything off the motherboard that you can, heat sinks and all. It should just be the bare board.

Some of the videos I've seen of people heating their boards they use tin foil to cover the parts they don't want baked, well...I don't have tin foil.

I'm single, don't cook much and am not worried about aliens reading my thoughts.

Anyway, I preheated the oven to 350. Solder melts around 400 degrees I believe, but I wasn't sure, so I shot under.

I just set the board in the oven, bottom of the board up and carefully balanced on top of the metal cage that makes up the core of the Xbox. If you set it right, only the copper edges should be on the cage.

I baked it for about 5-7 minutes and checked to see if the solder looked melted. It didn't, so I turned it right side up and put it back in for 5 minutes.

Now, in interest of full disclosure, at the point I took it out some of the transistors were hissing and some brownish liquid was coming out of the tops of a couple.

So I figured I had royally messed it up.

But I hooked everything up and gave it a try. It's been a few days and everything is good. You will need to buy some of that heat sink paste, because the oven will bake it all off, and it isn't good to reuse that stuff after you break contact anyway.

I still haven't put it back together, so my Xbox is just a motherboard and CD Rom sitting on the bottom shelf of my entertainment center.

But so far, so good.