Hardware eBay replacement lasers

[Torque Effect]

They any good? I've already ordered this one.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/XBOX-FAT-G2...b2c44d0&pid=100290&rk=1&rkt=4&sd=252553811635

Mainly because it looks like more professional packaging, and a less blue looking laser lens. (Which I hear the brighter blue they are, the more cheaply made they are, but that could be complete bunk.)

More than enough reason to pay $2 more for it, plus it's in the next state over, and not all the way across the country in California where it would guarantee and extra couple days shipping time. Plus I am not too fond of high volume ebay sellers, they are usually harder to deal with when something needs to be dealt with.

But yeah, the laser on my Liteon Phatty 360 went kaput, cleaned it up, tweaked the laser pot very very slightly, and it was working but still taking forever to rip games, and to recognize the game after being put in the disc drive. So I opened it up, tweaked it a bit more, and BAM open try on every single disc, no attempt to read. No amount of readjusting the laser pot would get it to read discs again, so yup. It wouldn't even read a audio CD and I thought that was a different diode on the laser assembly.

 

[DinohScene]

360 lasers are always red, it isn't blu-ray.

Try it.
Only way to find out.

 

[brickmii82]

I have a stock of lasers for the various drives that I keep handy. Haven't had any duds out of the 20 or so I've installed. Just don't forget to remove the anti-static solder blob before you put it in.

 

[Torque Effect]

Got my replacement laser yesterday, desoldered the anti-static blob. Got it installed and all put back together, and now it reads games again. But it's no better at reading the games than it was right before the previous laser burned out.

It should be playing games it's had no trouble with in the past, but now unless the discs are in near perfect condition, they will spout disc read errors almost immediately after attempting the install. Disc drive doesn't sound as loud as it should, I consider that a bad thing as that means the discs it can read it's having a hard time with and needs to slow down how fast they spin in order to read them at all.

I'll tear it down and do a slight pot tweak and see if that helps any. To me it seems like when the did the adjustments at the factory they set the resistance too high. wouldn't surprise me considering it's a cheap replacement sold at less than $10, i doubt they do any proper adjusting of these lasers at the factory.

Because this drive used to be able to read even the most jacked up used games I had bought, now it has a fit with a copy of Skyrim with some light surface scratches.

EDIT: With a 1/8th turn to the left on the pot, it seems to be working perfectly now. Installing my copy of Rage which immediately gave a disc read error before the pot tweak. (An old Gamefly rental) Going to try some more scratched up game installs after this one is done.

EDIT 2: Well it got through all the games I had trouble with before, but now for some reason some spotless discs are throwing disc read errors now. They all seem to be newer games, like Battlefield 3 (Both discs), and Destiny. I'll tweak it a little more and see where that leaves me.

EDIT 3: Now with yet another pot tweak, Battlefield 3 now installs perfectly fine. Go figure.

360 lasers are always red, it isn't blu-ray.

Try it.
Only way to find out.

Yes I know, but I was talking about the color of the lens, not the laser itself. I guess you can say though looking at the color of the laser lens is a poor way of telling the quality, and I can't find any information on the internet to back that up, other than some random youtuber.

 

[DinohScene]

Youtube is full of lies.
Spreading misinformation like that only adds to it.
Not to mention it's extremely hard to get out of peoples minds then.

Replacing it with a new laser and pot tweaking is really the only option.
Lasers die over time, unfortunately.
All consoles have that problem.

 

[Torque Effect]

Yeah, I know.

I was under the impression though that a pot tweak wasn't necessary on a new laser, since not one person mentions it in any guide anywhere.

 

[DinohScene]

Some do, some don't

Manufacturer doesn't have time to set every individual laser to their best setting.
It's far to time consuming ;p

 

[Torque Effect]

Some do, some don't

Manufacturer doesn't have time to set every individual laser to their best setting.
It's far to time consuming ;p

Makes sense. lol

 

[DinohScene]

Eh, as long as everything loads fine then I guess it's alright.

Best thing to do (which is what the PS4 and Xbone are doing) is to install the games to the harddrive anyway.
Reduces noise and stress on the laser.

 

[Torque Effect]

Eh, as long as everything loads fine then I guess it's alright.

Best thing to do (which is what the PS4 and Xbone are doing) is to install the games to the harddrive anyway.
Reduces noise and stress on the laser.

Ever since they updated the 360 to support installing games to the HDD I've always installed them for this very reason. And that update dropped only a few months after I had bought my 360, with the NXE update in November of 2008. I don't remember when I got my 60GB HDD at the time, because I had bought one of the remaining stock of 20GB 360 units because they were dropped to $300 to clear the rest of the stock to move the 60GB Models (Which I found out later were newer motherboards too), but it couldn't have been too long after or before that update, since I bought the 60GB HDD specifically because of the HDD install feature, well that and 20GB was an abysmally low amount of space.

Made my own 320GB HDD back when that was the biggest you can get, and even with the 60GB I was finding myself deleting allot of stuff to save space. Used a 320GB Western Digital Black drive I got off newegg. Still using it to this day. lol I've occasionally thought about upgrading to a 500GB, but I've always found 320GB to be good enough.

 

[DinohScene]

One of the best updates the 360 ever had, literally.
I miss the NXE.
Blades dash was alright, Kinect was horrible and Metro is meh.

 

[Torque Effect]

One of the best updates the 360 ever had, literally.
I miss the NXE.
Blades dash was alright, Kinect was horrible and Metro is meh.

Yeah, looking at videos of the old dashboards, Blades and NXE really were by far the best of the Dashboards NXE mainly because it just added a crap ton of new features, Kinect like you said was just awful, and Metro just took the Kinect dashboard and made it tolerable, but still meh.

EDIT: Actually I was wrong, the HDD install feature wasn't implemented until Nov 2010. How'd I screw that up? lol

So my 360 did see over 2 years of playing games straight off the disc, and those were some of my heaviest years playing games.

HDD installation was implemented in the Metro update.

 

[DinohScene]

Couldn't have said it better meself.

It's also one of the reasons why I like FSD so much, it looks feels and behaves like the NXE.

 

[Torque Effect]

Couldn't have said it better meself.

It's also one of the reasons why I like FSD so much, it looks feels and behaves like the NXE.

Ahh, now that's one I don't have experience with because I don't like modifying consoles that heavily rely on internet connectivity.
Once they shut down the servers for the Xbox 360 entirely, that's when I will mod mine.

I've already noticed that the download servers for the 360 have been heavily throttled down, as it takes me the same amount of time to download a 4-6GB 360 title on my 360, as it does to download a 40-60GB game on the Xbox One.

 

[DinohScene]

I highly doubt they'll cripple the 360 any time soon.
It'll be another 5 orso years before it's completely out of network.

 

[Torque Effect]

I highly doubt they'll cripple the 360 any time soon.
It'll be another 5 orso years before it's completely out of network.

Yeah, my thoughts exactly, once 360 game backwards compatibility on the Xbox One is no longer a thing, that's when we will probably start seeing servers start getting shut down. But now that ther are even doing original Xbox Backward compatibility now, that may not happen for a long while. lol

Once keeping the servers up are costing them more money than it's worth to keep a few people happy, they will shut them down. But shutting them down anytime in the next year or two might piss off way too many people.

I know some 3rd party game servers are already shut down, mainly from big EA titles.

 

[DinohScene]

The game servers will fall the first indeed.
The login servers however will probably stay standing for a looong time.
I'm not entirely sure of the Xbones BC shares the login servers of the 360.. but if they do, I forsee them being online till those things shut down.