Bad girl.... good girl

I have two odd traits - I'm cheap and I think I'm a fix-it-up wizard. The last one has some basis in fact but it isn't necessarily so.

I want to continue to fix up the SnowBox - if just for appearance sake... but the local Xbox fix it places won't sell me a replacement case. So... I started cruising Ebay. You might see where this is going....

Knowing my own thought glitches I set parameters so I would hopefully get what I wanted - a replacement plastic case - and maybe some other Xboxes to play with within a certain price range.

I ended up buying two Xboxes - labelled complete, in good physical shape, with power brinks and all cables - but don't power up. And one hard drive. With shipping it came just at my price point.

At the same time I ordered a few more tools from Amazon. Yes, I was a bad girl.

The Xboxes arrived with extreme speed! Before the Amazon stuff. After examining the two boxes I realized two things: first, the cases weren't going to work with the SnowBox - they were a different style. Second, they wouldn't power up because they sent the wrong power bricks. Heh.

It's the kind the Snowbox takes. And they were in better shape. Swap time!

A quick trip to the local GameStop taking with me the old brick and I got credit towards the correct one! Take it home, plug it in... one of then boots! Woo hoo! I felt so happy with my note book writing down the serial numbers and the kernel numbers. Just putzing around making notes of all the parameters I could find... pure joy. Can't explain it. Wire it up to the Internet... check networking... it's a BANNED CONSOLE.

Microsoft will ban a console - not an account, but the actual hardware - from XBox Live because it had been hardware hacked. It also seems like if you're a real sh*t they'll ban your hardware and your account. There doesn't seem to be a way to unban a console so I'm not sure where to go with this. I might actually see about chatting up a Microsoft tech about this.

This means I can't use it for XBox Live stuff. I'm not sure if I can download apps for it but game disks still work on it. The hard drive works but DVD drive is sticky. That I can fix. Fans are noisy. That I can fix.

The other has the 3 lights RING OF DEATH. That I might be able to fix when the tools come in from Amazon. So it's too soon to tell.

Now, for the good girl stuff.

I've got enough technical chops to resurrect some computers from the dead. I have a couple of old XP machines that I've done that with... but... what do I do with them? Nobody wants them. Oh, I can come up with some bogus excuse to hang on to them and play with them... in fact, I was considering upgrading the power supply in one because... well... reasons...

Or I could just recycle them and be free of them.

Be free of them.

After ripping out the hard drives they went into the trunk of my car. They accept electronics for recycling at work so they'll end up there Monday. Then I'll be free of them.

-m