Well it seems that Microsoft's 'get the product to market first, deal with the bugs later' approach has left the consumer with a product full of design mistakes. These bugs can either act alone or work together to shut your Xbox down.

The Xbox 360 is filled with many power consuming components in box. Each little chip inside produces a bit of heat, and then you multiple that by a thousand. The Xbox uses heat sinks, vents, and fans to disperse all the heat, but because of poor design and placement, many users will obstruct the vents. When the temperature rises too high, many design flaws begin to act up leading to the red ring of death.

To protect children from messing with the led inside of the Xbox 360, they used lead free solder. Lead free solder is a lot more brittle, and to add to Microsoft's fail, they used a lead solder that becomes brittle with exposure to heat over long periods. Each time your Xbox 360 turns on, it produces heat which stresses this brittle solder, and tiny hair-line cracks will begin emerge. These cracks are the same cracks that force the Xbox 360 to prompt you with the Ring Of Death!

The X clamp, being a cheap method of chip holding, is a poor design because it's holding force is uneven. The X clamp's ends puts the force on four corners on the motherboard. The more heat produced by the Xbox 360, the more pliable the motherboard becomes and things tend to break. The worst part is, that when the motherboard heats up, and the X clamp put's pressure, it will break the lead free solder. Over this this adds up only to be your one concern, the Ring of Death!

On many older Xbox 360's the thermal compound was cheap and put on wrong. Many "ring of de ath" failures can be attributed to this. If you decide to fix this error, you must apply fresh thermal compound!

The soldering process during manufacture was done at too low a temperature. When lead free solder is under heated, the resulting solder joint is full of voids and other defects. These weak joints won't hold up for long even under normal circumstances. If you include the other Xbox faults such as running too hot and warping of the motherboard, you've got the perfect formula for failure.

Instead of going to an experienced vendor for its chip design (ASIC vendor), Microsoft designed the graphics chip in house, in other words, on it's own. They did this in order to save some tens of millions of dollars in the cost of the design.Although Microsoft has some experience here, it doesn't come close to the level of expertise of the ASIC vendors. As a result, their graphics chip is inefficient in that it dissipates too much waste heat.This problem dovetails in with the weak cooling system in the console. Microsoft has gone to an ASIC vendor in the US and had the graphics chip red esigned. This move goes a long way to resolving the overheating problem. However, there are lots of Xbox units in use that still have the old graphics chip. These will continue to be susceptible to heating problems.