God Bless Al Gore

No, not for Global Warming. For the other thing he made up. The Internet.

We had a minor tragedy in our house the other day. Our much beloved XBOX died. Well, not dead exactly, but near enough. We use our XBOX for watching movies, listening to music, and playing the occasional video game. The other day it stopped showing video, only giving us audio.

A quick call to the manufacturer left me fuming. The polite woman in Bangladesh (who started off on the wrong foot with me by lying and telling me her name was 'Mia') informed me that the 3 year warranty did not cover this particular failure, that the 1 year warranty was up, and that I could pay them $120 and they'd be happy to fix it. A new one is $200. Of course, she pointed out, they would be happy to pay shipping both ways as a courtesy for me paying to get it fixed. Previous research told me that instead of fixing mine and shipping it back, they'd be shipping me another broken one they had already repaired, then foisting my broken unit off on someone else. Yeah, not so much, thanks. Even the 'Escalation Expert' (who introduced herself as Janet, which I'm pretty sure wasn't her real name either) I was transferred to was unable to help. I guess I got a little fired up on the phone. Go figure. You buy electronics these days, you expect more than 14 months of life out of them. To top it off, this was my 3rd one in 4 years, the first two having been replaced under warranty.

Luckily for me I live in a world where Al Gore singlehandedly jump started the mother of all technological advances. A few hours of research yielded that this was a very common problem, directly resulted to poor design choices and cheap materials. The short version is that when the electronics inside get hot (as they are prone to do)the inferior solder weakens, resulting in loose connections on the microchips. There is a 'clamp' in there that is supposed to keep everything tight. This is the poor design choice. It flat out does not work. It is made of metal. Metal tends to expand when it gets hot. So if metal stretches when hot, how effective is a metal clamp in a hot environment?

For $30 I was able to buy a kit that replaced the clamps with screws. I spent a nerve wracking afternoon gutting the XBOX and performing minor surgery at the kitchen table. I am happy to say that so far so good, it is working. I am actually pretty amazed how easy the whole thing was, and that something as simple as a few screws and washers could have been utilized in the first place to solve this problem.

Al Gore, you're my hero!