3 Red Lights Xbox 360 - Your 3 Repair Options
What is the 3 Red Lights Xbox 360 all about? In the simplest terms, it is a situation where you see 3 flashing red lights on the front of your Xbox 360 gaming console where you usually see a ring of 4 steady green lights. The cause of the so called "XBox 360 Red Ring of Death" is overheating inside the Xbox 360 GPU (general processing unit). Excessive heat builds up inside the xBox 360 during heavy game play and when it gets hot enough inside the GPU, some of the video chips get damaged. There is also an issue with solder joints inside the GPU with the heat build-up where they can soften enough so that electrical current through the solder joint loses connectivity. The 3 red flashing lights is actually a diagnostic tool built in by the Xbox 360 designers so that they could immediately know what type of failure has occurred with the X360.
Now that you know what the 3 red lights on your xbox 360 mean, what do you do about it?
You basically have 3 options:
1. If you are still covered under Microsoft's extended 2 year warranty for the 3 red lights problem, you should call their 1-800 support line and make arrangements to send your Xbox back to them for repair. If you are under warranty and try to either fix it yourself or send it somewhere other than Microsoft, you would void your warranty and not be covered for any other problems your Xbox might experience.
2. If you are past the 2 year warranty period, you can send your xbox out to a 3rd party repair service that will fix this problem within about 5 to 7 working days. The cost for this should range between $40 - $50. You can find people offering these services on eBay.
3. Your 3rd option is to fix your Xbox yourself. In order to do this, you will need to get one of the Xbox 360 3 red light repair guides that are available for purchase and immediate download on the Internet. These guides are priced between $20 - $30. There are several to choose from. You can find reviews of the top four 3 red light repair guides on this site. These repair guides take you step-by-step through the repair so even if you are someone who is not usually comfortable taking apart computer hardware, you should not be nervous about this particular repair. Most of these do-it-yourself guides also come with video instructions that actually show you each step of the repair process. The videos pretty much make this repair brain-dead simple because you can watch a particular step in the repair, replay the video, then pause it as you perform that repair step yourself.
This do-it-yourself option only requires simple tools that you can get at your local hardware store. The entire repair will take you anywhere between 1 -2 hours (the promotions for the guides say "30-60-minutes", which is not a realistic time frame if you want to take your time and get it right!). But in any case, the do-it-yourself option will have you back up and running the same day that you experience the problem, which is much faster than options 1 or 2 explained above.
So if you want to get back to playing as fast as possible, the do-it-yourself route to fixing 3 red lights on the Xbox 360 is highly recommended.
