By Jeremy D. Wells
Carter County Times
Today I learned that Microsoft hates the idea of its customers repairing hardware so much, they tied the disc drives to the motherboards in their Xbox360s. This means that if your disc drive goes bad (as mine did) and you get on eBay and purchase a working disc drive from someone (as I did), you can’t just swap them out.
If you do, your Xbox thinks the game disc you insert is a DVD instead of a game disc. Whether this is by accident or design (and it’s presumably the latter) the end result is it prevents self-repair to tie the disc drive to the motherboard. Or at least complicates it.
I learned this after spending a slightly frustrating afternoon breaking into my 360 slim, and replacing the drive so we could breathe some life back into it. Once I finished that, I was really disappointed that I couldn’t fire up some of those old games.
A quick scroll through Reddit gave me an answer though, and I rushed to the garbage to grab the discarded components. My hope is that I can swap the control boards on the disc drives, and this will be enough for me to get everything working the way it should.
It is going to require some light soldering, but shouldn’t be too far outside my ability.
I’m trying to be Zen about it, and look at it as a learning experience. I mean, if I’m really being honest, I enjoy getting these things working almost as much as I enjoy playing with them after they are up and running again.
But it’s also got me thinking about the rights of consumers to repair the items they own, and how difficult companies make it for us to do so. Whether it’s a battery with chips that prevent the use of generics, or components like disc drives that can’t be easily swapped out, it almost seems like engineers design these things to be difficult to repair, without improving the performance or functionality of the machines in any way. It’s just another way that corporate America squeezes us for a buck, encouraging us to just toss something out and replace it instead of repairing it.
Planned obsolescence at its finest.
Contact the writer at editor@cartercountytimes.com
