Busted Xbox 360, Broken Dreams

Unless you have lived under a cave or in a rock, you have heard that Xbox 360 has had major hardware problems. You've also heard it's going to cost a billion or two to fix this problem. Everyone knows this already, so there would be no point in retelling that story. That wouldn't make me any better than the xbox which I so badly want to insult. No reason, unless I wanted a red ring of death on my page views or a reply from associated content saying, "Try writing about something that people care about."

I want to share my story about my xbox and why the year 2007 is the year of the broken things. We have a broken bridge in Minnesota, a broken mine in the dirt.....or Utah to be exact, and broken toys from China that actually hurt people. Is the world falling apart? The answer can all be summed up to one vice, greed. Greed is selling people short for money.

My xbox broke because they outsourced all the labor to India and rushed the Xbox, so that they could get ahead of the competition. They didn't care that it wasn't tested thoroughly, they knew that some were going to bust, so they had a 1 year warranty and an optional insurance plan to protect yourself from a bad xbox. They hoped a lot of people would get the insurance and thus, get more money. One thing to remember is that the business world is a numbers game. They wanted as many sold as possible and if 1% were broken, who cares, because they sold 500% more than if they would have waited a little. I digress.

My Xbox 360 broke when I was playing Halo 2. I decided to look online on how to open the thing. You have to be very ingenious to figure it out. You also need to have special tools such as a torque. The plain old screwdrivers just won't work this time around. They haven't worked since before Super Nintendo. I finally got the beast open and a daunting thought came over me, "Why did I do this?"

I knew I couldn't fix it, but I'm a guy, so I had to open it up and try to figure out what was broken. Unless there was a mouse in there, I didn't have the technical ingenuity to fix it. I decided to look on youtube to find a how to fix video. I came across one that said you need to hair dryer the CPU until the glue is hot enough to pull the processor off of the metal. When that is off, you can put on more thermal compound and your Xbox 360 should work for another month or two before you have to open it again. I didn't want to completely destroy my xbox, so I decided not to risk pulling things off of it . I left it on the table for a couple of weeks. In the meantime, I forgot how to put the thing back together. The good news is that I had a story to tell people.

I became enraged at Microsoft for making such a piece of sleek, visually intoxicating, piece of garbage. I decided to go back to playing regular Nintendo and Super Nintendo, since they still worked after 10 years. I walked by the xbox everyday and thought about putting a note inside of it, with comments about the xbox and what I think about Microsoft in general. I also wanted to get a dead mouse and put it in there before I decided to send it back to Microsoft.

This is all before they ran the article stating that they were doing a massive recall. I think they should have just given everyone a free working xbox in the first place. It took Microsoft fifteen years to make a working operating system and we expected them to make a working game machine in five years? The good news is that, once you hit rock bottom, you can't get any lower.