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Technical difficulties

Diagnosing errors and troubleshooting

The Xbox 360 will display a "Screen of Death" if the system experiences a serious error. In such instances the user is prompted to contact Xbox customer support.

In the case of certain specific errors the Xbox 360 system will display a diagnostic pattern of red lighting in place of the standard green "Ring of Light" around the power button. These patterns indicate the following:

Overheating

Because of its high power consumption, the Xbox 360 console poses a moderate risk of overheating if users do not follow the guidelines prescribed by the user manual. Users are advised not to obstruct air flow to the enclosure vents or power supply. Problems associated with overheating include reduced system performance and instability that may result in crashing or hardware failure. Some Xbox 360 owners have even installed custom cooling solutions in their consoles to prevent this from happening.

Microsoft has been working with a Singapore-based company, Chartered Semiconductor, to create new 65-nanometer chips. These new chips will have reduced power consumption and in turn, will run cooler. They will also be cheaper to manufacture than the current 90-nanometer chips. Because the logic design and clock speed will remain unchanged, performance will not be affected.

Disc scratching

When a user moves the Xbox 360 from a vertical position to a horizontal position, or vice-versa, while the system is on, the inserted disc may brush against the drive's pickup-assembly and incur scratches to its reflective coating. The Xbox 360 owner's manual specifically warns against moving the system while it is powered on. However, some users also reported that their disc got scratched without moving their consoles. Microsoft does not replace scratched game discs, by simply replacing the media, because they do not own the rights to some games. Until recently, they offered a free copy of a Microsoft Game Studios Xbox 360 title as a replacement for scratched disks. Microsoft conducted its own research into this topic, and concluded that without moving the console, discs cannot be scratched, and therefore no longer issues replacements. Note: Consoles equipped with the Toshiba-Samsung manufactured drive may experience dislodging of the disc when the console is tilted with a game inserted. This could damage your disc as well as your drive. Users with drives manufactured by Hitachi-LG have only reported damaged discs. The most sensible advice is to not risk it and simply not move the console while it is in a powered-up state, or with a disc inserted.

CORRECTION.. I WORK FOR XBOX.. When the console has a game in it either on or off it will still cause a misbalance on the disc mount if it is moved. Therefore it will cause scratches on the disc when it is turned on.

Disc drive noise

Compared to previous generation game consoles the Xbox 360 is quite loud. Much of this noise is produced by the disc drive when it reads a game disc. Because games can be played both with and without the detachable hard drive, the drive spins close to its maximum 12X speed to reduce game load times. The drive generates less noise while reading backwards compatable Xbox discs, video DVDs, audio CDs, or other non-game discs since these do not require as high a transfer rate and are not spun as quickly (lower scanning velocity, see also constant linear velocity).

With the third production run of the Xbox 360, the original Hitachi-LG DVD drive (model GDR-3120L) was replaced with a slightly quieter Toshiba/Samsung DVD drive (model TS-H943). Phillips drives were only used in pre-release development Xbox 360s.

References

1. "Xbox 360: Four lights flash red on the Ring of Light", Microsoft, 24 November 2005
3. "Microsoft Xbox 360 refuses to replace scratched discs", gameshout.com, 1 December 2005

• Xbox 360