fox

Come to think of it, I've never seen any brand recommendations anywhere for new clock capacitors.

why not just give it a new clock capacitor

what works for me is heating the opposite side of a circuit board and tapping it on something SMDs fall right off in perfect condition

I wonder how much of a reduction you'd get with solid copper heat sinks having the same mass of the aluminum ones it shouldn't be too difficult to cast some

In all the threads I've seen, the people behind those super small builds would remove filter capacitors to reduce the draw on the 5v rail for the small PSUs to work. But they never gave an account of how the xbox behaves with those capacitors gone. That lack of info has kept me doubting the feasibility of a super small build.

Lol. When I got a 1.0 last year I thought the PSU plug wiggling around was a poor design. Didn't know it was getting millions of consoles fried back in the day. I epoxied that sucker down as soon as possible.

I'm poor so I use whatever I can. Wires from junk cables and stuff. Cheap flux with lead in it I gotta scrub off like crazy. A 25W no-name iron with a bare copper tip I brazed an extension on when corrosion got the better of it. A big coil of tin/lead solder I found in a box. Some knives. Needle files. Sandpapers. Strop paste. Various adhesives and solvents. It all does the job.

>lots of flux and patience Just to add, I'd recommend non-conductive flux. I bought cheapo flux with lead in it and had a hard time with shorts circuits post-installation. Even after scrubbing my board twice in the shower with soap and a toothbrush, followed by compressed air and days of drying time. The thinnest residue left between those very narrow ram legs was enough to ruin everything. Also, the whole method of flooding the legs with solder then wicking off the excess is bullcrap. I fried a board trying it that way. Again, the legs being so narrow and their pads extending so far back underneath it's impossible to see a solder bridge. And when you're talking about 400 legs in total it's basically guaranteed you'll bridge some. I also found it's impossible to correctly position the modules if the pads are lumped with solder from the factory. One can level them with de-soldering braid but at risk of lifting pads. So tons of de-soldering experience is absolutely important. One more thing: shaky hands. Probably the most discouraging part. At least it was for me. I figured out I could achieve perfect stability of my iron by holding the tip with needle-nose pliers. Suddenly the difficulty level dropped to 1/10. No kidding. I've soldered even finer-pitch SMDs this way since then with no problem..

Nevermind. I just remembered other utility discs and downloaded them on a hunch. Turns out AID includes the retail bios.

Well, on xbmc my box has a serious problem with the time/date randomly changing to something from the 17th century, and it all started shortly after I TSOP'd it. After going down the process of elimination I can only guess it must be bios related. The way I flashed it was with slayers, but slayers doesn't include a retail bios on its list of stuff.

Anyone know how? It's been 3 years since I did xbox work and I honestly forgot how or even IF you can stick the factory bios back on. I already googled this for an hour.

The power button has a trace running under the board that intersects the clock capacitor, and I'm gonna bet yours leaked and ate that trace. Same thing happened to a used board I bought. The damage was so microscopic I couldn't locate it without a 10x magnifying glass. On the other hand a resistor could have died. Get yourself a multimeter and do a simple continuity test of the points on this page: http://fillwithcoolblogname.blogspot.com/2011/02/1st-gen-xbox-trace-corrosion-repair.html

Wish someone with enough electrical engineering know-how would design a tiny PSU that gives sufficient 5V amperage. Would be nice to make an ultra-slim case without ripping out 5V filter capacitors to get those pico PSUs to work.

>New screws to hold the casing bottom half and top half of the Xbox case together Just cut down the factory screws to the new height and braze them back together.

I did, and de-soldering modules from a donor board isn't necessary. Just use a heat gun to melt them off. The hard parts come next.