So I have a free evening with no plans, nothing urgent requiring my attention, so have the opportunity to go a bit further on re5.  Time to try and get past the heavily armed zombies who had me pinned down with their machine gun fire when I last played.

So a quick jump on the sofa, power up the X-Box and….

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now my X-Box elite is about a year and a half old, so unless it gets the full RROD (which comes under a special 3 year warranty) it is not under cover. So I have no cover for this VERY COMMON problem, that’s a stupid Micro$oft design flaw which should have been sorted many version back… (Not that I’m bitter or anything!)

So. While lying on the floor clutching the re5 boxset and crying, I had to decide what to do…

My options are: –

1) Send it off to Micro$oft and pay the ransom for getting  this very common issue repaired (plus 3 week turnaround). This option also costs shipping charges, and prices start from £60 going up for how much they need to fix, and I do not trust the money grabbing *!$£^*%!£$”&.

2) Take it somewhere else to be repaired, and pay whatever they charge, and have a week or so downtime…

It was at this point a small voice at the back of my head said. “Err didn’t you spend years in university doing an electrical/electronic engineering degree? Don’t you have a shedload of electronics qualifications? Aren’t you supposed to be able to design motherboards, and build them from components upwards, even programing them?”

“Damn right, strange voice in my head! There’s nothing a Micro$oft engineer can do that in theory I can not.“

So, my plans are to collect equipment I need, and tomorrow fix my X-Box myself (And remove the design flaw at the same time preventing the issue coming up again!)

So stay tuned for my exploits delving into the insides of my X-Box, to find where all those characters live!