Huge wastes of money, #1: the XBox#

Sun, 17 Sep 2006 01:32:44 +0000

After one last attempt at soldering a wire to a very small pad on the motherboard of my XBox (the "D0" connection, a necessity for adding a modchip so I can run Linux on it), I have finally decided: fuck it, if Man was meant to meddle with this crap, he'd have - well, I don't know, but either some kind of natural appendage or else a suitable tool for doing so. The natural size of the solder droplet covers about five times the area of the pad it's supposed to attach to: even the wire (the thinnest stuff I could find in Maplins) is thicker than the pad. That plus it appears that a 12W soldering iron doesn't ever seem to get hot enough to actually melt silver solder, and, well.

I can totally accept that some electronics tasks require skills I don't have, and it seems pretty clear this is another of them, but whatever cretin decided to describe modchip soldering as "simple" deserves to have officers of the Trading Standards Institute go round and insert his temperature controlled Weller soldering station through his pupil and into his optic nerve.

Did I say "waste of money"? £45 for the xbox (second hand), £15 for the modchip, a tenner (I think, can't recall) for the xbox controller-> usb adaptor, £10 or so again for the USB wireless adaptor (it was supposed to be a media centre thingy, and I'm not running ethernet all the way to the stereo just so I can get mp3s across the network to it) and various sums of money spent on low-temperature solder, desoldering braid, a new 12W pencil tip soldering iron when it became obvious that my gas-powered iron stood no chance at all of doing the job, and it starts to add up. By this point it's started to add up to the kind of number that makes me think "I could have bought an ordinary PC, and it probably wouldn't be that ugly either" and it's still not doing anything useful.

To give you an idea, obviously it depends on the size and resolution of your monitor, but in this picture the image in the right is closer to actual size than the one on the left. Go on, I dare you to tell me I'm ham-fisted.