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A short time back, I had some consoles repaired, upgraded, and refurbished, and the results were so good that I thought it would be good to post about it here, to recommend the company to anyone else needing such work done. All the more so since nowadays I'd imagine that companies who could work on older consoles must be few and far between. I have been a user of the original XBox for more than two decades now, and when I bought it I had it chipped at the same place, and have used the XBox not only to play the XBox's native games, but as an emulation machine (it's range of emulators is very broad, and they are mostly very good), and also as a media centre, though I stopped using it for movies when high defition became commonplace, as the ol' XBox is too slow for that. I still love the XBox for it's native games, and for emulation, though, so I wasn't happy when it developed a video fault a few weeks back. I wasnt aware of anywhere local that could do XBox repairs, but someone recommended a company to me (the company is in the UK, the same as me) via the emuxtras forum (https://www.emuxtras.net/forum/app.php/portal), so I got in touch with them, and after discussing what I wanted, I sent off my faulty, hard modded XBox, my working, unmodded XBox, and my soft-modded Playstation 2. And two weeks later, they arrived back (that time includes the time it took me to spend a day or two deciding what further I wanted done with the consoles). And this is the result: - my faulty XBox's video fault was fixed, it now works perfectly. - both XBoxes were chipped with the ModXo modchip, and the Cerbios BIOS (one of the XBoxes had a modchip, but I went with the new one because of future proofing - for example, now my XBoxes can support up to 16 TB hard drives!). - both XBoxes now have 1 TB hard drives (plus of course the required IDE to SATA converters). - both XBoxes had their RAM doubled to 128 MB. - both of the XBoxes had the hard drives partitioned, and a working dashboard was installed, along with the usual required utilities (DVD2XBox, UnleashX, etc). - both XBoxes had partial recaps, and were internally and externally refurbished. - the Playstation 2 has been refurbished, and it's internal battery has been replaced. And they even replaced a faulty shell part, free of charge! And the bloke I spoke to kept me updated on the work being done, and when I'd received the consoles back, he helped me with my questions about the new BIOS and XBox software (it's been years since I altered the system software on my XBox, so I had no idea what was new). The service was excellent, all told, and the prices were very reasonable, as was their turn-around speed. What also really impressed me were the cosmetic results of the refurbishment, the three consoles, despite being more than two decades old (ish, for my second XBox) all looked brand new, I mean really immaculate. They really look like they've just been unboxed. Basically, I couldn't be more pleased with any aspect of this service. Here are the company's details: Topvint PO Box PO Box 1035 WORCESTER WR4 4PA England e-mail: [email protected]

I'm a long time original XBox fan for more than twenty years now (my favourite genre is the first person shooter, for which the XBox was the indisputable king of it's generation), and when I bought my first model I had it chipped at the same time, to play homebrew on it. For years it also doubled as my media player, until high definition files came along that the otherwise superb XBMC was too slow to play. I upgraded the hard drive a couple of times, and it ended up with a 500 GB IDE hard drive full of XBox games, emulators, music videos, etc. The original XBox is a superb emulation centre for 8 and 16 computer/console/arcade games, with quite a few 32 or 64 bit games (such as Nintendo 64 or original PlayStation games) running fine too, though of course the extra hardware resources needed by some 32 or 64 games, and the older age of many emulators for these systems means that many other 32 or 64 bit games have graphical/audio/gameplay glitches, or even won't run at all on the XBox. Anyway, a few weeks back I turned on the XBox, and it had somehow developed a video fault, the screen was now flickering. I found a business (in the UK) that I'd never dealt with before, and they fixed my faulty XBox, and refurbished two other consoles of mine, and their speed, quality of service, and prices are great, and I was wondering if I'm allowed to recommend them on here. What is this forum's policy on business recommendations for repairs and upgrades? I realise that, even though it would no doubt be helpful for some users (assuming the recommendations are genuine of course) then some 'recommendations' might be lies, especially if self-posted by a person/company or just plain scams. So is a one time recommendation by someone for a given company OK, or is it against the rules (especially for a totally new user like me, though I'm a very long term user of Emuxtras (username of Clockface) and came here via: https://www.emuxtras.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=187&t=7878&sid=39ac9891adc0cef4055d8b8382024e22