I might have (finally) gotten a bit of good luck with the broken Xbox.  I managed to squeeze some pennies under the motherboard in the electric tape/12 penny trick that’s spread across some forums and Youtube videos.

This caused my completely dead box (E73) to switch errors to E74.  After a short intentional overheating, the machine started up again!  But…it would overheat nigh immediately (after less than a minute).  I would see the startup screen, the menu would load, then I’d get two blinking lights and a blank screen.

So now, my machine is running topless – everything is as attached as it can be when half of the cover is completely missing.  This solved the overheating problem.

That wasn’t all, though.  My DVD drive wasn’t functioning well – it would say “Open Tray” as the only option when a perfectly good game was in the drive.  I was able to open the drive up, adjust the laser’s position slightly and wipe a bit of the gunk that had somehow accumulated on the laser track.  After putting the drive back together and into the system, it seems to be working now.

So, my Xbox has no top cover, an extra 12 pennies wrapped in electrical tape iin the bottom, and a (temporarily) working but finicky DVD drive.  But I was able to get it all functioning (at once!) tonight and played several (disc-based) games successfully as well as watch a movie on Netflix Watch Instantly.

So, I’d call this a possibly temporary but definite victory.  Maybe all the havoc I put the internals of the system through will actually hold up.  Maybe.

In the meantime, I guess my gamertag is back online and I can finally participate in my co-worker’s Battlefield Wednesdays.