On one of my recent thrifting expeditions I happened upon this original Xbox that was the super-cool halo edition in transparent green. I looked around for a power cord that I could test it with at the store but couldn’t find one. They were only asking $10 for it anyways, so I took the chance and bought it.

Upon bringing it home and connecting it up, I soon discovered that it didn’t power on at all. After some googling around I found out that it is quite common for the capacitors to go bad on these, especially the ones that are near the power supply. So I opened it up and sure enough, the capacitors had asploded (look for the brown goop coming out the top in the picture):

$5 on Amazon and a week later I’ve got new capacitors! I removed the old capacitors using my desoldering pump, cleaned the area of the board and then soldered in the new ones:

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Then, the moment of truth! It powered right up:

I’m not sure what I’ll do with this now, probably trade it at a retro expo for more Nintendo stuff 🙂