Fixing my Xbox 360

Well, last night I was met with a disappointment as I was playing Xbox. All was well and then it froze. No matter, right? It happens on the rare occasions. After resetting, I ended up facing the red ring of death. It's happened to me before, but unlike last time, my warranty was expired which meant I was out of an Xbox.

After doing a bit of searching on Google, I think I found a solution to my problem. I found a page on how to replace the thermal paste on the heatsinks in the Xbox and hopefully, I will have fixed the problem for about $25 vs. $200 for a new Xbox.

These are the two heatsinks for the Xbox. After getting the whole thing apart, it was easy to see how much extra paste was applied in the factory - way too much! I've read that the design for holding the heatsinks in place isn't the greatest, and when the console gets too hot, the heatsinks lose contact with the CPU and graphics processor which lands you with the red ring of death.

This is the motherboard of the Xbox, minus all the extra stuff like the fans, heatsinks, disc drive, etc.

These two points which are still covered in paste at the moment are where the heatsinks connect.

I'm still in the process of cleaning up the processors. I guess I'll find out later tonight if it worked or not!