What is the science of the Xbox 360 towel trick?
It works like this: Originally, the old consoles had an insufficiently heatsink on the graphics chip, causing the chip to overheat. As you know, heat causes things to expand, so the motherboard beneath the chip started to expand and warp out of shape, causing some solder joints under the chip to lose contact. Since the graphics chip couldn’t be controlled correctly with missing contacts, the console displayed a “Something’s wrong with my hardware, but I don’t know what” error: The three red lights. Now the towel trick does the following: The towels wrapped around the console, cause the hot air to remain inside the console. This causes all boards and elements to overheat and epand. With a bit of luck, the board will warp, so the contacts of the chip are connected with the board again. So after you unwrap the console, it *might* work again. However, as you can imaging, it is only temporary, as the graphics chip will overheat again, causing the board beneath it to expand and warp again, l
