Slashdot Mirror
Fix Your Crashing X-Box 360 With String
mkraft writes "A gamer fed up with his new Xbox 360 crashing every 20 minutes has fixed the problem by raising the power supply off the ground with some string. Goldeneyemaster over at the GameSpot forums indicates that the main reason for his Xbox 360 freezing up is the power supply overheating. The solution is to lift the power supply off the floor and allow the air to circulate better around it."
Not having seen one, ( nor will i buy one ), but i would imagine that a set of LARGE rubber feet would raise it enough to get some air flow..
Oh, and keep it out of the carpet..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'm wondering what will happen next summer, problems will get even worse.
My guess is that everything was tested on a nice hard bench. When you stick the PSU on a carpet the inherent fluffyness of the carpet blocks the ventilation and causes it to overheat.
And 'fixing it with string'? Sounds more like 'fixing it by allowing it to get some AIR'...
If some power supplies are overheating during the cool season, we should expect even more problems next summer.
I can see cooling being a big issue for the CPU and graphics chips which have to dissipate quite a bit no matter what, but the power supply? A well designed switching supply should have very low losses and run cool.
Wouldn't it be easier and more reliable to buy a power supply that functions without overheating? As long as it provides the correct voltage and is rated at the correct number of amps, there's nothing special about a given power supply.
well afaik a power supply has to deliver constant voltage as well as clean power. I'm guessing your run of the mill "cheap" power supply wouldn't be able to deliver and the console would crash all the time. If you had access to a good clean power supply, then I don't see any harm, but you might end up paying quite a few bucks. And if I just spent 400$ on a console, I would be really upset if I had to also buy a 100-200$ power supply.
Goddamn you Micro$oft users love getting raped!
I know you're a troll and you don't really deserve an answer, but...
Actually it's not Microsoft users who love getting raped, it's early adopters. And a damn good thing too: without early adopters, we patient and reasonable consumers wouldn't get good products with all the design kinks worked out.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
That's no excuse. This is a freakin' game console. You've got to expect the power supply to be sitting down on a carpet and design around that.
You are probably right... but if everyone was a 'patient, reasonable consumer' then maybe MS would have to fix their shit before they, you know, ship it? Otherwise no one would buy it. Just a thought.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
...Why didn't they do more in-depth burn-in tests of these?...
Why would they?
Why should they incur that expense?
They have beta-tes^H^H customers out there that willingly PAY THEM $400+ to do it for them. Literally fighting each other at stores for the oppurtunity.
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
This absurd situation is the direct result of buying a sysphisticated piece of electronic hardware from a software company. And not just a software company, from a huge software monopoly.
This kind of thing, and hell, this precise situation, would never happen in a company that is run by engineers. Real engineers, not software engineers or sanitation engineers. People who have been rigorous trained in the behavior of physical materials when acted upon by systematic application of an energy source. People in hardware companies don't sell stuff that gets fixed right out of the box by hanging the power supply by a piece of string. There are lots of other people with experience and scars from past mistakes that ensure that this doesn't happen. And if by some circumstance it does occur, the engineers in other companies don't forget about it and managers don't rehire the engineers who were responsible at that same level. Like Deng Shao Ping, they must first spend some time on the pig farm to contemplate the consequences of their mistakes.
But not designers in a software company. Real world hardware doesn't exist, in theory. If you put 100 volts across a eighth-watt 10-ohm resistor, you get 10 amps. My super calculator says so. Actually what you get is a bad smell. Couple this with the atmosphere of upwardly-mobile incompetence found in any large corporation. Lock it in place by the office politics of having "yes men and women" generally promoted over innovative corporate in-house entrepreneurs and you have a situation where your customers are hanging your new state-of-the-art showcase product by a piece of string in order to get it to work.
All this is worse in a monopoly corporation, because they have already reached the maximum possible business goal through past operations. Anything new and innovative can't improve the situation. Therefore managers have nothing to gain by encouraging and rewarding competence and innovation. Add the generalized hubris of 5000 pampered 30-year-old grade-point-angels who have spent their entire lives becoming the best in class at passing tests and pleasing the teacher, drop in a pinch of clinical psychotic behavior in the upper levels of management, and you've created the perfect Frankenstein organization.
Microsoft.
That would explain why the product is so scarce in the first month or so. Release a couple thousand, listen to the problems, adjust, release the rest.
This absurd situation is the direct result of buying a sysphisticated piece of electronic hardware from a software company.
;-)
... a huge software monopoly
... nope never could happen. For the flamers reading: Apple is primarily a hardware company, they are merely most famous for their software (well until iPod) and that software is the hook, the justification, for buying their more expensive hardware (have to cite the Mini as a break in that historical trend - not in a literal sense but in a practical sense). This is why they will not offer Mac OS X for the standard PC architecture.
Microsoft has produced sophisticated hardware before, for example Z80 coprocessor cards for Apple IIs. This let Apple II users run CP/M back in the day.
OK that was a while ago, more recently we have keyboard, mice, joysticks. Not quite sophisticated, even when you toss in force feeback
The above may not qualify as sophisticated by it does show that they are also a hardware company to some degree.
And, uh, you are aware that the XBox360 is a followup to something called the XBox? I think that little piece of hardware may fall in to the "sophisticated" category.
Irrelevant. Apple enjoys an equally monopolistic position over *it's* customers and Apple is able to design some very nice hardware.
This kind of thing, and hell, this precise situation, would never happen in a company that is run by engineers.
Like a hardware company named Apple, a company that has been producing sophisticated hardware for nearly 30 years? Oh yeah, they've never shipped with bad power supplies, bad batteries that could catch on fire,
If use of Apple offends you we could use HP (pre-Compaq), Intel, or a host of other companies to prove the same point.
Why not? It's a game console. Remember playing SMB with your friends when you were little? The nintendo would sit out in front of the TV on the floor and the game pads would connect to that, so you could sit on the furnature while playing.
Small kids play these game systems, everyone knows that. They should be built tough. I'm guessing the Xbox 360 is probably built tough, but it only takes a single weak part to ruin all of the effort.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Well the question has to be asked, what temp did your server room get to?
Where I work we keep the data center at 20C, if 1 unit fails the temp usually rises to about 25C, if 2 fail (it's happened once during a hot summer) the temp rises VERY quickly. I've seen the average temp at 65C, I'd hate to guess what some of the temps were inside the servers who didn't have the thermal protection enabled in bios.
I've seen mobo's that have been lightly burnt / melted around the CPU socket.
Good thing it's not summer over there, or there might be even more issues reported.
Can't wait for the Australian release - mid summer - with all the people who don't have air-conditioned homes trying to run this think in 35+ degress celcius and see what happens...
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
Why should it fall on the engineers?
Legal responsibility, that's why. The whole point of a Professional Engineer can be summed up as "the buck stops here, and I can vouch for every piece of the design, so if the design was followed, I agree (personally; not my company) to pay the penalties."
Most people don't know this, but 'Engineer' is not some phrase you can toss around or apply as desired. It's actually a legally defined term, such as 'Attorney,' 'Medical Doctor,' 'Registered Nurse,' or 'Senator'. As is the case with the title 'attorney' or 'M.D.', it's a criminal offense to call onself an Engineer if s/he don't have a Bachelors (or better) degree from an accredited university, as well as having been officially tested and licenced by the proper governmental authorities (and have the requisite number of years of experience in the field, and have your apprenticeship signed off by multiple Professional Engineers). You can't just tack the name 'Engineer' to a job and/or title; as is the case with Attorney, in which you have to be licensed by Bar, or a Medical Doctor, in which you have to be certified by the boards, an Engineer must also meet similar requirements.
The law was written to allow only competent, licenced individuals to make decisions that can have lethal consequences. Professional Engineers are quite aware of the consequences should they not perform their job with all dilligence.
While it's been fashionable lately for tech wannabies to tack the phrase 'Engineer' to their job description; ie. "Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer", or "Certified Netware Engineer", 'network engineer', this practice is illegal and punishible as fraud in most localities. (Microsoft can call it whatever they want; but technically, you can only say you have an MCSE certificate, not that you're an Engineer.)
The practice has really only survived because Engineers, in general, don't get all pissy about people abusing their official/professional title. Hell, I only mention it for education's sake: I have an Engineering degree, I legally can't call myself an Engineer for precicely this reason -- I'm not professionally licensed by the state (nor can I become licenced until I have a few years more experience). Yet when people ask, I tell them I'm an Engineer...
Of course, in the case of people misusing the title of Attorneys or Medical Doctors... I can understand the Doctors worrying-- I wouldn't want to find out my 'doctor' simply put the initials 'M.D.' on his front door. But who in their right mind would want to piss off the same profession that includes the prosecuting attorney, the judge, and the guy defending you?
In every state in the USA (and pretty much every other democratic nation), a Professional Engineer has to sign his (or her) name to every design before it can be sold and/or built. If the design is found to be faulty, civil cases (for money) can be brought against the company. Criminal cases can be brought against the engineer for his/her negligence. Such cases against engineers aren't uncommon (IIRC, it happened to the engineers who signed off the design of the World Trade Center).
Mechanical engineers are the ones who are (legally) responsible for any thermal issues involved in a design.
Electrical Engineers don't generally have to be professionally licenced; case in point: at my university, two of the EE professors are licenced. All of the ME professors are. EE students don't have to pass the FE (fundamentals of engineering) exam to get their degree; ME students do. The number of cases where it's required to be a licenced EE are currently quite small; the largest one is to be an expert witness in a court of law. But an ME needs the licence for just about everything he does.
A good part of this is difference is maturity: The understanding of electrical devices is only a couple of centuries old; however mechanical devices are a couple millenia more mature. I'm sure a century from now, an E
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
It is in Texas, where this nonsense was been repealed.
Which actually happens about 0.01% of the time. If the failure of the design won't turn somebody into a nasty smear or splatter, the law is universally ignored. With no consequences to the public. Welcome to the real world.
It has survived because prosecuting it would bring the wrath of the state legislature crashing down. As it did in Texas, when it was discovered that companies were being driven out of business by a state board dumb enough to believe their own pieces of paper, a state board who said with a straight face that the inventor of the integrated circuit was definitely not an engineer.
Have you actually read some of these laws? Like the one in my jurisdiction that requires not merely that the P.E. have a bachelors degree, but that it must come from an institution where every technical professor also has a PE (I.e., no institution on Earth grants qualifying degrees.)
Or the ones that define engineering so broadly that telling someone that two inches of styrofoam out to keep their six pack cool all day is a regulated act of engineering. So broadly that all radio hams must be PEs.
Wrong. The letter of the law requires all design threats to property to be licensed. Not just significant threats, all threats no matter how tiny. Every electronic device incorporating a totem-pole output must be approved by a PE (because the device will destroy itself if the upper and lower switches are turned on at the same time). That the device costs $0.08 and makes a light blink in a novelty toy powered by a AAA battery does not matter. It is Regulated Engineering and by god must be controlled.
Because writing aircraft fly-by-wire firmware and writing Hollywood graphics rendering software are both software engineering. Both require tremendous technical knowledge, the techniques for getting correct results are well established, and billions of dollars depend on each. Yet the required quality is drastically different. One must never fail, while it's OK if the other needs a full-time babysitter.
Licensure on the basis of knowledge, education, or task will always fail. Everyone will ingore it, and any engineering board foolish enough to try to enforce its regulations will be sternly corrected by their state legislature. The rational approach would be to draw up a list of particular types of designs that are regulated. E.g., airplanes, custom architecture, outdoor power lines, tanks operated above a pressure of N psi, and so forth.
And what if you could bring a particular software engineer to justice