Hacker News Reader

I remember taking apart an Xbox with RRoD to find that all the solders had disintegrated. Reflowing may have helped but I just sold it to GameStop instead

The simulation runners got angry with the banning of ChatGPT in Italy as it risks diverting from the most fun universe-simulation mainline and have started to send signals to get us back on track.

It doesn't say in Wikipedia, what is the towel for?

If you let it run wrapped in a towel it would sometimes temporarily fix it

The towel insulated the Xbox and remelted the BGA.

If I recall, the theory was that wrapping your 360 in a towel and turning it on would heat it up so much that whatever microfractures in solder joints that may have been causing the RROD problem would temporarily bond together again and make your Xbox usable for a time.

It issue was with brittle solder on the boards and wrapping it in a towel and turning it on would allow it to get hot enough to (hopefully) re-flow broken connections.