A close call.
Last Friday I was watching a movie on my Xbox 360 while fiddling around on my Macbook when all of the sudden my neighborhood had a series of brownouts (where the power almost goes out, but not quite). As this happened my 360 shutoff and tried to restart, but couldn’t – flashing the dreaded red ring of death instead. I got up, turned the 360 off, turned it back on, and everything seemed fine.
A few minutes later, however, the same thing happened. Another brownout. My 360 failed, tried to restart, and threw up the red ring of death for the second time. This time I got up and just turned my 360 off and left it off, fearing that if I turned it back on and the power fluxed again it might cause permanent damage. Since it had restarted successfully before I didn’t really think about it after that; that is until I tried to play Bioshock. I continued my previously saved game and noticed right off the bat that something was wrong – the game would play fine for about 10 seconds and then stutter, freezing for 2 or 3 seconds. I tried restarting the 360 and even tried creating a new game, but the problem was persistent. I figured that was the end of my 360, the power outages earlier must have called its final swan song. So then the next morning I went ahead and tried it again, hoping (for some reason) that the problem might have resolved itself overnight. Unfortunately I once again saw the sporadic in-game freezing and figured it was time to start thinking about calling Microsoft.
Before I did that however, I tried a couple different games to see if they also had the problem. First I dropped in Call of Juarez (which I just recently received in the mail from Gamerang) and noticed that I wasn’t seeing any of the freezing like I did in Bioshock. Call of Juarez isn’t a very demanding game so I went ahead and put in Gears of War which I assumed would demand more out the 360’s hardware. However, as with Call of Juarez, I didn’t see the problem. Just to make sure I put Bioshock in one last time and saw that it was still freezing. I returned to my computer and tried to find the Microsoft site that lets you register your 360 and request service for it.
As I was looking for that particular link I happened across some forums where people were discussing that a recent Bioshock update was causing sporadic freezing in the game for them. The symptoms described were almost identical to the ones I was experiencing so I tried their suggested fix. What they said to do is to hold the left and right bumpers when the 360 starts up – before you get to the dashboard – and then again hold the left and right bumpers when you fire up Bioshock (until the red 2KGames logo appears). What this does is clear the hard drive’s cache and fixes the problem. It worked!
I had completely forgotten about the Bioshock update (which I now remember downloading) until I saw that forum thread. Now my 360 is working just as it should, running Bioshock better than ever. I’m sure those rolling brownouts didn’t exactly help my 360 but I was very happy to find out that the red rings they produced had nothing to do with the problem I was having later. I get to keep my Xbox 360 – for now.
