Fixing The Red Ring of Death - A Simple Guide
So, you would like to find out how to correct the infamous XBox 360 Red Ring Of Death? Ironically, one nice thing about the "Red Ring of Death" (aka "XBox 360 3 Red Lights") is that so many gamers have had the problem, there is a lot of information out there on how to fix it and several do-it-yourself guidebooks and video covering the topic. Essentially the Red Ring of Death is a sign that your console has suffered a fairly serious hardware failure, usually due to overheating inside the GPU (General Processing Unit).Not to worry though, as I mentioned, the problem is well documented and well known to Microsoft so you're not out there on your own with this one. Microsoft even extended their warranty for the 3 red lights problem to a full 2 years from the original 90 day warranty. So if you are within two years of your purchase, you should send your unit back to Microsoft for repair. Yes, it will take a little longer than fixing it yourself, but your warranty will remain intact and the fix is free and guaranteed.
If you are out of warranty, you'll probably want to either look into one of the 3rd party repair services that will fix this problem in about a week for $50 or so, or get your hands on one of the excellent do-it-yourself guidebooks that are available out there for $25-$30 dollars. The obvious advantage of doing this repair yourself is that you can be back up and running within an hour or so of purchasing the repair guide.
If the idea of popping open your XBox and fiddling with its internal components scares you, it shouldn't. Fixing your XBox 360 yourself isn't nearly as challenging as you may think. Particularly, with the addition of videos to most of the do-it-yourself packages, you can literally start and stop the video as you perform each step and probably not even have to crack open the repair guidebook that comes with the repair package. Total time to fix the red ring of death yourself? About 1-2 hours.
So if you are no longer covered under Microsoft's extended two-year warranty, I would highly recommend giving the do-it-yourself option a try. Just about all of the guides come with 30 to 60 day money back guarantees, so you really have nothing to lose.
