The Xbox 360 is one of the best selling games consoles of all time. Its stellar sales should have been a great source of job and pride for Microsoft but unfortunately, thanks to some shoddy design work, the console was actually in danger of ruining the company’s reputation and losing it a fortune.
The problem stems from an error that has been dubbed the xbox 360 rrod. This stands for red ring of death and gets its name from the fact that when a hardware error occurs, the green power ring on the front of the case starts to flash red. Unfortunately, the red ring of death turned out to be much worse than originally anticipated, and as millions of Xbox owners started to encounter the problem, the name stuck.
Microsoft were slow to react at first and , in fact, actually denied that this was due to a design flaw at all. They put the early error s down to normal failure rates among hardware and tried to shrug off suggestions that they had made fundamental design flaws with the product.
However, as the number of reported cases of the xbox 360 rrod started to grow, there was no hiding from the fact that it was a fundamental error with the system. As it turns out, the most common cause for the hardware failure is due to overheating. In order to make the console appealing to gamers, Microsoft made the case as thin as possible and to keep it quite they installed small fans at the back and used passive heat sinks for the main components. The problem with this is that, as games started to push the hardware to its limits, things got decidedly heated under the covers. The result of prolonged games playing and higher clock rates is basically meltdown. The cooling system could not cope and hardware failure – resulting in the Xbox 360 RROD error .