Why Your Xbox 360 Will Ultimately Die And What To Do About It

By Jack Livingston

If you own an old Xbox 360, then getting more useful life out of it means giving it tender loving care. Any Xbox that predates the slim, is a very fragile device and treating it the wrong way can get it red ringed. This article will cover a couple of things you can do to keep your console running strong.

Most micro electronic components will overheat and fail in a few seconds if they weren't kept cool by a cooling system. This is because of heat generated by power running through them and their small size. When power is forced to flow through small things, they tend to get hot very rapidly. Overheating is always a problem with electronics and especially so with micro electronics.

Since the motherboard inside the Xbox 360 is made up of micro components, it has the same vulnerability to heat. Because the cooling system is barely adequate, your console can easily overheat or run on the hot side. This prolonged exposure to heat over time will "wear down" the micro chips inside the console and reduce it's useful life. This slow "breakdown" can be further accelerated if your Xbox is used in dusty or poorly ventilated areas.

Another issue with heat is how it causes warpage of the motherboard. Repeated warpage stresses and weakens the solder joints. When one or more of these joints break, your Xbox ceases to function.

The most important thing you can do to reduce heat exposure is to keep the console from overheating from the outset. Therefore gaming time needs to be restricted to one or two hours at a time. Keep the environment cool, ventilated, and dust free. There is another practice you can try after you've finished a gaming session. Let the console idle for twenty minutes at the Xbox dashboard before turning the power off. The fans will continue to run allowing the Xbox to cool even further since no new heat is being generated at this time.

Failure to do this means that a lot of left over heat from your gaming session gets trapped inside the console. This heat eventually dissipates but takes longer to do so which increases the exposure time of your console to heat. This additional time does add up over the life of your Xbox.

The idea behind the two tips given here is to keep the overall exposure of your console to heat at an absolute minimum. This increases the life of the internal components and therefore the life of your Xbox. Too much heat exposure can also dry out the thermal compound inside the console. This will almost guaranty a two red light error and perhaps the red ring of death as well.

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Microsoft's New Technology Changes Your Living Room Area Right Into A Video Game

By Kurt Hennigan

A new patent that was filed through Microsoft shows your whole living room area being turned into an online game environment. The latest technology is most likely to be part of the Xbox 720 and will be able to project the environment of a game you are actively playing into the walls of your games room. The system is being referred to as "environmental display". For Microsoft this would certainly be taking the Xbox 360 Kinect to the next level, and anything no other console has done before.

The environmental display is apparently designed to tie in with Microsoft's 3D Kinect glasses that have the capability to track where you're looking and make a 3D image.

Other than the projection system there is a 3D depth camera that sends out infrared light to locate a player and put you in the environment. The environmental immersion system that Microsoft will probably one day be developing is a remarkable feature, the Xbox 360 console has been created much more productive with the release of the motion sensor Kinect, so is motion sensing the near future for gaming?

This sounds very interesting and will take gaming to the next level. The concept of virtual reality has existed for the past two decades yet it has not truly removed. Console designers have embraced high definition and now motion sensor technology rather. 3D gaming has also reared its head yet gaming has yet to reach the levels of virtual reality. The concept of showing an environment certainly appears to be using the idea of virtual reality and making it a possibility yet there are a few drawbacks.

The Xbox 360 bundles together a hardcore gaming experience and with Xbox Kinect you can select to play more lively and fun games. Among the major defects of this system we can see is the call to have an empty room with white walls? How many of us have an extra room in our house that's fully committed to our Xbox 360 console and has no furniture? Projecting an environment virtually rules out the vast majority of avid gamers. People merely don't have a spare room and this is exactly where things get tricky.

Whenever virtual reality was depicted in television or films, it's often been made through a headset of some sort. Only time will tell just what exactly Microsoft is planning with this patent but we're in for a fascinating gaming future. It certainly is a quite intriguing concept, and one that might be developed for the next generation of Xbox consoles.

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