Lee Bialecki’s Weblog

My Brother’s Xbox 360 failed yesterday and shows the 3 red lights around the power button, so I did a bit of research on what could have caused this.

The red ring of death appears around the power button of the Xbox 360 when there is a hardware failure, which seems to be happening to far too many people. The fact that Microsoft has actually included a hardware failure indicator means that they were probably expecting things to go wrong.

Many people’s Xbox 360s have failed and have needed to be replaced my Microsoft. The cause of this problem is said to be overheating. Because the CPU and GPU are the parts which generate the most heat, the area of the motherboard closest to these places will heat up faster. The spots of the motherboard closest to the CPU and GPU will expand faster than the rest. Like with bi-metallic strips, the mother board wants to bend, so if the motherboard is not properly held in place, the solder joints can crack or break causing the system to fail.

It is thought that the Xbox 360’s motherboard is not properly supported, so the motherboard is able to bend causing the solder joints to break. The Microsoft has used lead-free solder for the Xbox 360, which is more brittle than the older tin/lead solder. So when the console does heat up, there is a large chance of the console eventually failing.

Today I discovered the mobile wordpress site m.wordpress.com, it is really handy for when I can’t sleep at night if I have a blog idea or if I need something to do.

I can’t wait to get my iPod touch to replace my PSP as a mobile web browser, seen as it has safari I shouldn’t have to use any mobile websites and just browse the web at my will.

I knew that Microsoft would make at least one mistake with vista and all the new software they have released. When reading up on office 2007 I saw something about the errors in excel 2007, Microsoft has reported that the problem exists in the display of six specific floating point values between 65534.99999999995 and 65,535, and six values between 65535.99999999995 and 65,536.

Any calculation that results in one of these twelve values will be displayed incorrectly. The actual value stored and passed to other cells is correct, only the displayed value is wrong. As of September 26, 2007, Microsoft reportedly has a fix, but it is still undergoing testing prior to release.

Seen as they have taken so long working on vista, they probably rushed some parts in the OS and software to use on it. They will probably fix it soon; I suppose that nobody ever releases final products first anymore. The same applies with the Nintendo DS and PSP, with their lite versions which are much better than their predecessors.

Why did they have to put the price of freddos up to 15p? I used to buy one every time I got 10p or more change from something, but now they have raised it to 15p I just don’t buy them anymore. The problem was that the longer thinner bard with the patterns on it weighed the same but cost 5p more, so instead of lowering that price they raised the freddo price, greedy chocolate men!

Why does software have to cost so much? I have a trial of office 2007 on my laptop, but it will cost me loads just to get a product key. It is just greedy to charge a person for something that is free. It is the same with adobe and other industry standard companies; they charge obscene amounts of money for their products just because people will pay for them, so people who want their products for home use have to pay hundreds of pounds for something that they could just download for free. It is like the companies want us to break the law.