What is the average hardware life expectancy of an Xbox game-console?

Baphomet Wrote:I've got a 1.0 and have replaced my DVDROM drive in it twice since I bought it about a year after it came out and it has worked flawlessly, even after softmod and xbmc installation.

That is, until I woke up today and found it had rebooted at some point and UnleashX screen failed -- looked all squirrelly and audio was buzzing like it looped on one of the ambient background sounds.

Now all it does is try to boot three times and starts flashing orange/red lights.

All troubleshooting info indicates a bad video connection, but I have checked and rechecked everything, unplugged and replugged everything -- It's piped through a modulator and both cable and Wii work, so I'm sure that the video connection is good.

Thought it might be the DVDROM Drive, but it finally opened after messing with it with a paper clip. Dunno what the problem is.

ARRRRRGH!

If you get it to boot again.. TSOP flash it

do you get any error message or is the screen blank? if the screen is blank it's most likely the video chip that's failed which means you need a new motherboard

paul Wrote:do you get any error message or is the screen blank? if the screen is blank it's most likely the video chip that's failed which means you need a new motherboard

Could be the connection on the A/V harness on the board desoldered.. Or there might be a break in the A/V cable somewhere... Try different ports on your tv and a different A/V cable if you have one.. I bought a component cable for 10 bucks at gamestop

Well average consumer electronics are designed with a life expectency of 7 years in mind. In case of the Xbox, I think it could at least do that except for the DVD-drive as most of them are crap (Philips/Thomson) and just fail after a while. Unless you're the lucky owner of a 1.1 Xbox ofc (which has Samsung) ;-)

Yes, in my experience, disc drives are the first to go. When it does, you have a couple of options. Replace the drive, replace the drive's eye, or set up the BIOS to ignore the drive altogether.

Mine hasn't had a disc drive for about a year now.

arnova Wrote:Well average consumer electronics are designed with a life expectency of 7 years in mind. In case of the Xbox, I think it could at least do that except for the DVD-drive as most of them are crap (Philips/Thomson) and just fail after a while. Unless you're the lucky owner of a 1.1 Xbox ofc (which has Samsung) ;-)

The samsung drives still crap out... have replaced my 1.2 box with a samsung drive and it was gone within a year

I've soft- and hardmodded about 20 XBOX for people I know, who all use it on a daily basis. Most of them never turn the XBOX off (including me). None of them has had any hardware problem yet. I've bought all of them second hand from the internet. The newest one is a 1.2. SO they're all pretty old.
I guess you can say it's one of the most stable and reliable media center solutions there is. One of the reasons why I help a lot of not-so-computer-minded people stay in tune with the latest multimedia techniques

I have modded at least over 400 boxes (lost count) and I have repaired about 10 of them, started modding when flashing was made public so it's been a while.

I would say except the faulty dvd-drives there isn't much problem with the xboxes.

A few PSU's and one soundchip, two networkchips. There has been only one I couldn't save, but they cooked the GPU in it and for that I have no tools to solder it.

Yep -- No messages on the screen... Completely blank.

My daughter uses it the most and plays a lot of games, but only uses the media center occasionally. That said, it stays on most of the time because she likes to pause her games and come back to them so it rarely gets turned off, if ever, unless I'm toolin' with the skinz.

I found one post over at xbox-scene indicating a lead might have de-soldered and might need a jump. When I take it apart, I'll check where Anon (I think that's who posted it) indicated... I bought a couple of used one's off Amazon yesterday (I have no idea what models they are as I don't have them yet) for 50$, so maybe I'll fix it if I can sometime down the road. I haven't gotten into TSOP flashing or chipping yet -- cash is tight right now. I'll look into it again, and if the price is right, maybe...

Thanks for the tips guys -- If I ever get around to rebuilding it, I'll post back with my results.

I have had mine for 5 years (softmod), running XBMC about 2 hours every day since then.


You can get some stats out of XBMC to show the number of times the HDD has been turned on. Last check mine was over 1600.

The DVD broke years ago, but I have streamed all of my content since day 1.