If he's still under warranty, I strongly suggest sending it back to MSFT. They will upgrade the internals and attempt to reflow / resolder the GPU to the mobo better than I can do.

If he's out of warranty, no labor charges, only shipping & hardware (based on what you wanted done). To get the RRoD fixed, it's about a 2 hour job. Cleaning the processors is the most tedious thing to do.

The fix will get an undetermined amount of use back out of the console though. Some people say that their machines have been running for over 2 years with it, some RRoD again in 6 months. It all depends on the severity of the board warping.

If Mike RRoD'd by playing Halo 3 every night for 5 hours, then the fix might not work as well.

If he doesn't care about Xbox Live either, I'll see if I can flash the DVD rom to read DVD-R DL's too. No more buying games.

On top of the services posted earlier (6 items), I learned a new trick today.




This is done using a 2.5in Western Digital 250GB Scorpio HDD from Amazon ($45). I'm waiting for a HDD transfer cable to come in so I can remove the profiles / save data from the 20GB it's replacing.