What is the red ring of death, when talking about xbox 360's and how do i prevent it from happening?

Answer 1

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The red ring of death is when your Xbox 360 shows 3 red lights in the upper left and 2 bottom quadrants of the power circle (when you have your Xbox 360 in horizontal position.) This indicates a power failure in your Xbox 360.
There are 1 of 3 reasons why this happened:

1. Chords connected to the Xbox 360 may have become disconnected, just try replugging in all of the cables and try turning it back on.
2. Your Xbox has overheated from playing too much. Try leaving your Xbox 360 off from anywhere from 1-4 hours. Then try rebooting it.
3. Your Xbox 360 has a hardware failure, there is no way of getting it fixed (at least responsibly by yourself)

When you get the Red Ring of Death, you call Microsoft at 1-800-4MY-XBOX and they will send you a box (dubbed "casket") for your 360 to send back to them for repairs. Make sure you remove your hard drive and any cables so that the only thing going into the box is the 360 itself. Microsoft will most likely only send you a refurbished Xbox 360, not the one you sent them, so your hard drive/cables will be lost if you send those to them.

There are a lot of ways to prevent the Red Ring of Death, and here are some of the most obvious:

1. LUCK - you may have gotten a faulty system right out of the box. Try looking for a 360 with the latest manufactured date to make sure that it is more reliable. (newer ones have a cooler-running Falcon chip in them.
2. PLAYTIME - never play your 360 for more than 6-8 hours in one sitting. This will majorly cause your 360 to overheat, which will likely cause the Red RIng of Death.
3. OPEN SPACE - make sure you have plenty of open space where your 360 is. The other most common reason why people get the Red Ring of Death is because they don't give the Xbox 360 enough room to breathe/aerrate.
4. FAN - if you are really worried about getting the Red Ring of death, put a small fan behind the 360 blowing air away from the 360 so the hot air does not circulate into the back of the 360.
5. HORIZONTAL- store your 360 in a horizontal position (flat) so the disk can play right. The 360s have no support on the disk that will allow it to stay in place while the 360 is on, so the disk may fall from the disk tray when in vertical position, scratching the disk and maybe breaking your 360. Also, this will prevent you from knocking it over and breaking the console.

Good Luck....

Source(s):

I am an experienced 360 owner.

Answer 2

Red ring of death is the name for when your xbox 360 over heats due to over-use. It is given away by red rings appearing around the power button when you try to turn on your 360.

There are some tricks that keep it at bay for a short time, but nothing in reality, the only way to prevent the red rings is by never playing your xbox more than 12-13 hours without breaks, just because you can do an all niter doesn't mean your 360 can. But if you do get plagued by the rings, you will have to send your xbox to Microsoft for a 2-month repair.

Also, you could just get an xbox 360 elite, they come with 2 internal cooling units, so it's guaranteed that they will not be affected by the red rings.

Hope this helps!

Answer 3

the red ring of death can be given to a number of situations if you look in your manual (if you have a 360) it should say when the lights on the front (where it displays what controllers are connected) turn red instead of green.
It can mean anything from its over-heated to the hard disk is corrupted

Unfortunatly you cant do much about some things if it happens it happens you can avoid over heating be giving it enough room (about 10cm all around) to allow a good air flow and not keep it in a confined space.

Answer 4

There is nothing you can do to prevent it. The red ring of death is actually from the 360 games stressing the componants from the inside. The amount of resources necessary to run the 360 games especially when playing offline is tremendous and over time the processor , and other componants fry, warp and crack. One way to slow it down is when you are done playing a game, exit the game, then just goto the main xbox menu and let the xbox sit for about twenty minutes to allow it to cool slowly then turn off the system. Keep the console off carpet and keep it out of the entertainment center....Do not use an Intercooler, they void your warranty....

# Standing the 360 up for better cooling--7 out of ten 360s will scratch discs in this position. 4 out of ten will scratch discs when laying down...Contact microsoft if this occurs, this is due to a different design flaw unrelated to Red Ring of Death.

Keep your receipt, and Microsoft extended the warranty on the system to 3 years which should get you through till they release a better system..

The ELite is even prone to getting it. It is an engineering design flaw.

Answer 5

The red ring of death occurs when you use your Xbox 360 too much, for long hours, mostly 10 and up. Miccrosoft have extended the warranty to 3 years, so when you buy an 360 and you get the "red ring of death" or any malfunction, just send it to Microsoft and they're repair it for you for free.

Anyways, to prevent the Red Ring of Death, you need to store your 360 in a cool room and use it for a period of hours everyday or try to give it a day of a break and use it the next day. Use it wisely.

To know if you have the "red ring of death", there should be 3 lights or 4flashing on the power button when you try to power your xbox on. When that happens, call microsoft.

If you want to know MORE about the red ring of death, why not try looking it up on youtube, loads of people have encountered this problem. Also, some people have used a "towel trick" to cure their 360 from this problem, they just cover their 360 with towels and unplug all wires and wait for 20 minutes and when they come back, it's the same way as it was, BUT.. Do not use that TRICK! There has been a rumour that it melts what's inside your Xbox 360 since when your covering it with Towels, it's really overheating it!

Send it to microsoft straight away when red ring of death happens.

Oh and, Xbox 360 is known as "Coffin 360" or "Coffin Xbox"
Something like that o.o "Xbox Coffin" <

Answer 6

um, thats what u call the 360 when it over heats. u should just stop playing for a couple of hours and maybe it will work. if it dont....sent it to miccrosoft they should help u.