That Pesky Xbox 360

[AngelicKnight]

I want to see how AOers deal with this one as opposed to the rest of the world.

Ok, so the 360 is riddled with a history of problems. We all know that, so I'll cut to the chase --

How do you take care of your 360? How do you avoid or keep problems to a minimum?

From what I've researched, there are various suggestions out there, some obviously contradicting others, such as these two:

1) Set the 360 horizontally. The disc drive is known to be noisy and has a bad habit of scratching disks in some cases. Sitting it vertically removes this problem.

2) Set the 360 vertically. Setting it horizontally covers more surface area and thus adds to the overheating problem. Setting it vertically helps ventilation.

My old 360 did fine disc-wise, wasn't even noisy, but after the red circle of death and a trip to M$, my refurbished replacement came in, and its drive has been rather noisy ever since, which has concerned me -- I'm really wondering if it's just going to up and eat a disc one of these days, though for the past few months, so far so good.

The other oddity is that this one's drive hangs when you press the open/close tray button. I have to press down on the tray with my finger after pressing the button to get it to release and open. Not a big deal, but curious. My previous one opened and closed normally.

So my theory at the moment is I need to figure out a way to lay it horizontal, but elevated, so that I have best of both worlds for the disk drive and ventilation. Don't know how I'm going to pull that off just yet, but I'm turning gears over the idea...

So what about AO 360 owners? What have you learned, and how do you keep yours running smoothly?