I give in.
I bought a used Xbox just about 2 years ago, at first primarily to play Halo. Got quite the deal on it too, thanks to some rather arcane ebay happenings beyond my control. However, I’m paying for that bargain now. It seems that some early Xboxes have faulty DVD drives. There were three brands of drives used, and lucky me got the bum (Thomson brand) one. It’s taken some time, but the drive periodically refuses to load things. I’m told they have problems with layer transitions on DVDs.
I’ve started playing Knights of the Old Republic II, which is just chock full of layer transitions. About 1 in 3 fails and crashes the entire system, telling me that the disc is either dirty or not an Xbox game. Very frustrating to happen every few minutes in such an awesome game.
So I broke down and bought a replacement Philips brand drive on ebay. Cheaper than replacing the whole system, and I won’t lose all my save games. I paid about $60 for it, much less than the $250 Microsoft would charge me for the parts and service. Not like I have a warranty anyway. Now all I need to do is find a set of Torx screwdrivers that I’ll need to open the Xbox up when the drive arrives. Anyone know a likely place to buy such tools?
I figure I need to teach myself more about hardware replacement anyway.