UNBELIEVABLE! It worked!!! I got the thermal paste in the mail today, and so right when Lucas went to bed I went to work tearing the xbox apart. I spent about 30 min cleaning of the CPU and GPU and then carefully applied the new stuff. Started it up and BAM! Works great, no overheating! Dancing with the Stars is on now- so after that is over the true test begins! I hope this thing stays strong!

I didn't even have trouble putting the face circuit board on! My friend Brian gave me all the confidence to do it alone... (HA- too bad he is not here to enjoy it!).

Blog... I forgot I had one of these. Let's see if I still have anyone that reads it- likely you have all given up hope now. Part of my absence is due to neglect, another part due to my xbox online subscription... After reaping the heaps of cash from Christmas I have hoarded it all to pay for an online subscription for my xbox. This allows me to play others online. Normally, I am not into that- but my brother got an xbox for christmas and so playing games with him brings me back to the days of old. I bought a headset and a couple games and now we talk about our lives in the middle of the night while we save the universe from evil creatures. The remaining pool of money was being drained down monthly by my subscription to Gamefly- a video game Netflix. I get the game, beat it, and then turn it in for another one. Brilliant. Instead of dropping $60 on a game I play for a couple months and then never again, I pay $15 a month and get four months of gaming for the same price on a large number of games. I was just about ready to get my brother signed up with it when the unthinkable happened- my xbox died! Yeah, I went to turn on a DVD for Rachel and I to watch and RED lights came up instead of green. As Lucas would say- uh oh! I played with it, and somehow it worked again and we got through a movie. After that, it worked a couple more times but then NOTHING. The red lights of death is what they call it- spinning off of the infamous blue screen of death known from another Microsoft product. So I look online and discover that this is a HUGE problem with xboxs and a common one. I call up xbox and demand they replace it or repair it- the best I get is a reduction in the repair cost to $100. I ain't got that money AND I don't want to give it to them for building such a crappy game system! (Seriously- I have owned Nintento, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, Sega Genesis, Playstation 2- and ALL still work to this day!) So I do my online searching and find two apparent do it yourself solutions- replacing the thermal paste (which was low quality) or literally torching the motherboard (to re-solder the connections). So, I start with the less extreme method, but think I might have bought the wrong stuff- and regardless it has no effect. So two days ago, I went out and rented a heat gun for $10. Mind you, this heat gun reaches a temperature of 1000 degrees F! Looks like a hair dryer- suprised I have not seen this mixup occur in a horror movie yet... Anyway- so I pull the whole thing apart and torch the memory and graphic chips- let it cool for 30 min and put it back together. I start it up and... BAM! IT WORKS! My game loaded up perfectly! And then... it died about 30 seconds later. This time with an "overheat" error, instead of the "general hardware failure" error I was getting. My hope is that if I use the better thermal paste it will be fixed. I ordered it off Amazon so we'll see. Of course, the idea that it gives an overheat error after I torched with 1000 degree heat might also be related... I'll keep you posted! Although my blog followers might be rooting against its ressurrection since it takes away my blogging initiative...