Someone gave me an xbox 360 which has the 3 lights on the ring of death. I've been looking up fixes for it and I found one in which they use pennies as a heat sink: Now my problem with this is the electric tap, how would that conduct the heat? Seems like it would be no better then the nasty goo stuff they use... Also while I'm at it is there a better way to reset the chips on the mother board then to over heat them? For instance:

Sometimes heatsinks don't put enough pressure on the processor. Washers have been used to increase pressure, maybe that's what the penny is for?

EDIT: Nevermind, I somehow missed the link to the video.

It worked for me - but the fix only lasted around a month. I'm yet to attempt repair again, stripping off all the heatsinks, reapplying thermal paste, and using various of the other fixes to try and resurrect my poor carcass of a 360.

Also - for overheating I simply unplugged the fan and left the thing on for about half an hour.

Seriously, no.

The only think that will work is a factory re-solding of the GPU and CPU, and even that will only work for so long, because there is no unwarping your board.