I knew that the Xbox 360 3RR, red ring of death problem… was so bad, that it actually would have been more cost effective for MSFT to give each buyer two 360s, instead of one, at the same price, because of how mismanaged the RMA process was… I knew a whole bunch of such details a almost a decade before the documentary on it came out.
Yay NDAs.
…
I was also there during the Windows 8 rollout.
Shut down basically everything for a month, because MSFT ‘dogfoods’ all their software: Every MSFT worker is beta/alpha testing all MSFT software all the time.
We spent weeks just, unable to have more than 3 windows open at a time, half the tools we used on a daily basis just not working.
We asked them to let us go back to 7, asked them if therr was some way to return to a 7 like GUI.
For weeks they said nope, impossible, Win 8 is an entirely new GUI, totally new OS, the Win 7 GUI isn’t there.
Oh then uh, weeks later, yeah, yeah it actually is there, you just have to follow this arcane override proceduren to see and use it.
… And then they just relented, put the non tablet UI fully back in, and called that Windows 8.1.
…
Windows is now layers upon layers upon decades of insane spaghetti code.
Even in Win 10, which was the last version I ever used… there are like 3 or 4 different eras of UI, for various settings menus, which people sometimes need to actually use… but they are considered legacy and thus not important.
Sometimes some newer era UI menus will have some of the options from some of the more buried stuff, but not all of them.
My favorite detail on the 3RL saga was when I took my second bricked unit to the local UPS store and they had a special bin for boxes that perfectly fit the 360 for shipping them back.
After a certain point, a bunch of the 360s… they weren’t even like, ‘fixed’.
They just … not sure of which exactly, this level of detail was basically rumors and contradictions from my POV…
But they were either just physically putting old hard drives in new units, that or just digitally transferring their contents over to new units…
And then they’d tell people ‘yup, your unit has been refurbished’.
Like, ship of theseus not withstanding… not really fixing them, no, rofl.
And then this would lead to other problems like… ooops, we didn’t correctly re register your new 360’s serial number to your Live account, or we didn’t deregister the old one, and now you’re unjustly banned because MSFT tech support fucked up.
…
Assuming my memory is still reasonably sccurate:
Though it did vary somewhat from team to team, the internal nomenclature my team was using was… 3RR.
Like, 1RR, 2RR, 3RR, 4RR.
While all of them were quite problematic, 3RR was the one that… basically 100% of the time, no over the phone, web instructions, or even RMA … could actually fix that one.
For the other codes, following over the phone / web instructions could actually fix it sometimes, or an RMA repair could actually fix it with a speific hardware component replacement… that or it was a problem with the actual cable connecting to the TV, or the Xbox was like, jammed in a little nook with no airflow, and dudes were chain smoking blunts in their apartment, rofl.
I have an original 360 I barely played. I don’t have any games for it really, but if I were to use it again, do you have any suggestions for avoiding red rings? My understanding is airflow is paramount.
Really the airflow thing is the most important for just most non catastrophicly unfixable problems.
Give a foot to its left and right of nothing, and nothing over it, if possible… don’t smoke in the same room with it, possibly plug it into a power strip/surge protector if the electrical in your living space is kind of shoddy, or your local grid is fucky wucky.
Do not immerse in water, do not have your dog pee on it, do not drop test it, etc, lol.
All that goes for the power brick as well, it also needs space to not overheat and … well, brick itself.
If your room temp is getting higher than maybe… 80, 85, 90 degrees F? Consider either getting an AC unit … or pointing fans at the 360 or something?
I throw my hands up at understanding precisely what that all means.
… maybe just… don’t give it internet access, at all, at this point?
Also, I am required by MSFT to inform you that, though it is possible to successfully hard mod your 360 into being able to run, and access unapproved software, this will void your warranty that is almost certainly no longer in effect, and may also lead to irreprable hardware damage and/or the revocation of your Xbox Live Xbox Games Pass account.
=D
(Yeah my actual job involved reorganizing and fixing up the spider’s web of… the entire branching set of all possible questions and tech support script prompts that all the call center tech support people would run down.
There were… I think over 1000 different possible nodes you could land on, god knows how many possible distinct, branched paths.
The super fun part was when my boss and I would find … infinite recursive loops within certain branching question/script paths, because we would be having people pick from an insufficient set of answers to a question … because we didn’t even realize some scenarios were even possible… which we did not realize because our contacts at the hardware design department told us they were impossible… even though … in actuality, they were indeed possible, and common, and hardware did not want to admit the extent to which the fundamental design was fucked.
So, if during the 360 era, anyone ever called into MSFT support and got stuck in an infinite loop of repeating questions: I am sorry, part of that is technically my fault, but in my defense, I was there from '11 to part of '12, I didn’t set up this broken system, it had existed for at least 2 years prior, and I tried my damndest to fix it in the 9 months that was me and my boss’s job.)
I used to do V Dash contracts for MSFT.
I knew that the Xbox 360 3RR, red ring of death problem… was so bad, that it actually would have been more cost effective for MSFT to give each buyer two 360s, instead of one, at the same price, because of how mismanaged the RMA process was… I knew a whole bunch of such details a almost a decade before the documentary on it came out.
Yay NDAs.
…
I was also there during the Windows 8 rollout.
Shut down basically everything for a month, because MSFT ‘dogfoods’ all their software: Every MSFT worker is beta/alpha testing all MSFT software all the time.
We spent weeks just, unable to have more than 3 windows open at a time, half the tools we used on a daily basis just not working.
We asked them to let us go back to 7, asked them if therr was some way to return to a 7 like GUI.
For weeks they said nope, impossible, Win 8 is an entirely new GUI, totally new OS, the Win 7 GUI isn’t there.
Oh then uh, weeks later, yeah, yeah it actually is there, you just have to follow this arcane override proceduren to see and use it.
… And then they just relented, put the non tablet UI fully back in, and called that Windows 8.1.
…
Windows is now layers upon layers upon decades of insane spaghetti code.
Even in Win 10, which was the last version I ever used… there are like 3 or 4 different eras of UI, for various settings menus, which people sometimes need to actually use… but they are considered legacy and thus not important.
Sometimes some newer era UI menus will have some of the options from some of the more buried stuff, but not all of them.
It is a gigantic fucking mess.
My favorite detail on the 3RL saga was when I took my second bricked unit to the local UPS store and they had a special bin for boxes that perfectly fit the 360 for shipping them back.
It was a mess.
After a certain point, a bunch of the 360s… they weren’t even like, ‘fixed’.
They just … not sure of which exactly, this level of detail was basically rumors and contradictions from my POV…
But they were either just physically putting old hard drives in new units, that or just digitally transferring their contents over to new units…
And then they’d tell people ‘yup, your unit has been refurbished’.
Like, ship of theseus not withstanding… not really fixing them, no, rofl.
And then this would lead to other problems like… ooops, we didn’t correctly re register your new 360’s serial number to your Live account, or we didn’t deregister the old one, and now you’re unjustly banned because MSFT tech support fucked up.
…
Assuming my memory is still reasonably sccurate:
Though it did vary somewhat from team to team, the internal nomenclature my team was using was… 3RR.
Like, 1RR, 2RR, 3RR, 4RR.
While all of them were quite problematic, 3RR was the one that… basically 100% of the time, no over the phone, web instructions, or even RMA … could actually fix that one.
For the other codes, following over the phone / web instructions could actually fix it sometimes, or an RMA repair could actually fix it with a speific hardware component replacement… that or it was a problem with the actual cable connecting to the TV, or the Xbox was like, jammed in a little nook with no airflow, and dudes were chain smoking blunts in their apartment, rofl.
I have an original 360 I barely played. I don’t have any games for it really, but if I were to use it again, do you have any suggestions for avoiding red rings? My understanding is airflow is paramount.
Really the airflow thing is the most important for just most non catastrophicly unfixable problems.
Give a foot to its left and right of nothing, and nothing over it, if possible… don’t smoke in the same room with it, possibly plug it into a power strip/surge protector if the electrical in your living space is kind of shoddy, or your local grid is fucky wucky.
Do not immerse in water, do not have your dog pee on it, do not drop test it, etc, lol.
All that goes for the power brick as well, it also needs space to not overheat and … well, brick itself.
If your room temp is getting higher than maybe… 80, 85, 90 degrees F? Consider either getting an AC unit … or pointing fans at the 360 or something?
Also um:
https://battleverse.io/is-xbox-live-still-a-thing
I throw my hands up at understanding precisely what that all means.
… maybe just… don’t give it internet access, at all, at this point?
Also, I am required by MSFT to inform you that, though it is possible to successfully hard mod your 360 into being able to run, and access unapproved software, this will void your warranty that is almost certainly no longer in effect, and may also lead to irreprable hardware damage and/or the revocation of your
Xbox LiveXbox Games Pass account.=D
(Yeah my actual job involved reorganizing and fixing up the spider’s web of… the entire branching set of all possible questions and tech support script prompts that all the call center tech support people would run down.
There were… I think over 1000 different possible nodes you could land on, god knows how many possible distinct, branched paths.
The super fun part was when my boss and I would find … infinite recursive loops within certain branching question/script paths, because we would be having people pick from an insufficient set of answers to a question … because we didn’t even realize some scenarios were even possible… which we did not realize because our contacts at the hardware design department told us they were impossible… even though … in actuality, they were indeed possible, and common, and hardware did not want to admit the extent to which the fundamental design was fucked.
So, if during the 360 era, anyone ever called into MSFT support and got stuck in an infinite loop of repeating questions: I am sorry, part of that is technically my fault, but in my defense, I was there from '11 to part of '12, I didn’t set up this broken system, it had existed for at least 2 years prior, and I tried my damndest to fix it in the 9 months that was me and my boss’s job.)
Thanks for your perspective!
I guess at this point it’s served its function. It’s made its money. Most people use mobile OSs/web nowadays anyway.