Ok this sucks. I now have no idea what I did to my Xbox. One day it was working with the mod chip, and the next *poof!* no video. I was previously messing with the NTSC/PAL settings so I thought I had perhaps set it to PAL, but I took it by a place in town that sells PAL TV's, hooked it up and still no video. GAH!!!!! This sucks. I was doing so well with this modchip thing. Now I can either buy a whole new Xbox, or I can buy a working motherboard from ebay and replace the one I have. Dammit dammit dammit. Back in the day I would have simply opened the replacement I bought, swapped motherboards and returned the 'broken' one. I used to be so good at deception. The problem is that I still am, but now I've decided that wrong is wrong. I guess Jesus will do that to you. :P Now I can see how easy it would be to get free stuff, but I have to not allow myself to do it. GAH! Oh well, I can transfer the hard drive and mod chip at least, so I'll only be out the money. Perhaps I can buy the motherboard on ebay and resell my old one once I fix it.

So this weekend I was sure that the computer gods were frowning upon me because, as of Saturday, I had three broken machines that needed fixing. This is in addition to my main workstation at home which is down until MSI returns my replacement board. My in-law's machine was just not coming on, I got my Xbox stuck in PAL mode (stupid Europe) and when I got home on Friday I discovered that my laptop had a corrupted partition.

Well I got the in-law's machine home, hooked it up and it worked perfectly for me. At first I surmised that the problem was in their monitor (which I have already told them is on its last legs), but after talking to Jimmy it sounds like the machine may have just needed some time in the corner to think about it actions.

The Xbox is still stuck in PAL mode. I tried a few techniques I found in the Xbox Media Player forums, but neither the blind XBMP button combinations nor the Enigmah Video Mode Selector disc worked. It looks like I'm going to have to find someone locally with a PAL TV to hook this thing up to. Either that or keep the new one and sell a PAL v1.0 Xbox on ebay.

As for the laptop, THANK GOD FOR ARS TECHNICA! After seraching their forums I came up with not only the exact solution that would fix my problem, but only used the WinXP boot disc. This saved me a LOT of work because I hadn't backed up recently and I had all of Matt's (mostly)finished DVD there.

Oh, and I can't say why because this is public and we're being secretive about it, but Chris is a genious. For future reference spies are cool.