Tried to fire up the 360 this weekend only to get a single red light accompanied by an onscreen E 74 error. The support page tells me to send it back for fixing @$99. I bought mine as a refurb about 18 months ago so it’s not covered under warranty. On the bright side, there’s no warranty to void, so I broke this thing down to the motherboard –twice. I’ve reset the heat sinks with no luck. Tonight I might try ‘baking’ it. I don’t want to. It sounds absurd to me that it would work, but I’ve been told first hand that it does work, so I’ll give it a try. I’ll let you know if it works.

A couple things struck me during the attempted fix:

1. It’s really a pretty simple device inside. It’s pretty much just a motherboard, a dvd drive, some big heat sinks, and, oh yeah, a couple really loud fans.

It gets HOT. Yeah, you’ve heard the Xbox gets hot. I’ve heard the Xbox gets hot. But I was shocked at how hot it gets and how fast it gets that hot. These heat sings are enormous. One of them stands about 3-4 inches tall, the other is short, but has a secondary sink on a copper rod about 4 inches away. When I first saw them, I thought “How can these things overheat? It looks to me like they should be almost entirely passively cooled.” Then I started the thing up – You can feel the heat on the sinks after about 5 seconds and they will burn your hand after about 15-20 seconds. What the hell is going on in there? I’m not even playing a game at this point. How graphically or processor intensive is it to boot and display an error message? I’m no longer surprised that these things die. I’m surprised they aren’t bursting into flames.