I was reading an article earlier that made it all the way up to the Yahoo! News front page entitled "Six ways to kill your console." As an Xbox 360 owner, I am always hungry to learn new ways to extend the life of my ever-in-danger 360. I keep one eye on the lights everytime I start it up to make sure they don't suddenly start flashing red.

The article claimed that not using a surge protector on your console is equivalent to "playing Russian roulette with its precious, oh-so-fragile innards." Using a surge protector for your expensive electronics is usually good advice to live by. According to various websites I came across about how surge protectors work, there are hundreds of millions of dollars in insurance claims filed each year on damaged electronics due to power surges. Newer technology such as HDTVs are especially vulnerable as they use a lot of fragile parts which can be fried by a sudden jolt of electricity from a power spike.

In the case of the Xbox 360, using a surge protector actually harms your console. According to the troubleshooting page on Xbox.com for a failing power supply, the "correct" way to plug in the power supply is directly into a wall outlet and not into a surge protector or power strip. Why is this so?

Well according to at least one Microsoft support representative, "The Xbox 360 is highly sensitive to reductions in power, and even the slightest cut in power can cause things like the fans and even the DVD laser to malfunction. Surge protectors can cause this, and probably 90% of the consoles they see have all failed in 6-12 months of being plugged into a surge protector." 

On one hand, the reasoning does make sense. Surge protectors and power strips distribute current between multiple devices and the amount of current it regulates to each one varies slightly from time to time. On the other hand, however, it means you are going to be taking a major risk that a power surge will murder your console on the spot. Choosing between killing it off slowly by plugging it into a surge protector or taking the risk of having it die right off isn't an easy choice to make. If you choose the Microsoft way, be prepared to rush to unplug your Xbox 360 in the event of a thunderstorm.

http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-13078-Xbox-360-Examiner~y2010m4d8-Surge-protectors-hurt-the-Xbox-360

Brilliant design, thankfully I sprung for the more expensive surge protector that is made for construction tools that need a lot of power.  My 360 has yet to give me one bit of trouble.

On one hand, the reason why good PC power supplies rate things like 'hold up time' on their spec sheets is due to factors like this and on the other hand the Xbox 360 uses an external power brick which is user replaceable and available on the 2nd hand market which ought to be enough reassurance for most people.

Let's play connect.

Most xbox360 are plugged into a power adapter.
Many xbox360 died.
Power adapter caused xbox360 to die.

The external power brick isn't the concern here, as we're apparently talking about fans and optical group malfunctioning when being underfed. I don't know the frequency response function of the various models of 360 power bricks but there's nothing it can do if it receives a lower power than needed for a time longer than its relaxation time. What the troubleshooting seems to say is that when the power is unsuitably low you get:

- laser diode malfunctioning

- fan malfunctioning

The first is fairly trivial... it means that you will get more disc read errors. No harm done to the hardware, the software will try to cope. But it might look like an optical reader malfunction to the user.

The second is more important: if fans slow down quicker than the chips cool off, you can get out of the safety thermal envelope and damage the chips. Apparently, this is a known issue and is about the design of the chips, fans, motherboard and air circulation engineering. Ideally, everything should be designed so that even when the system is underfed the chips manage to be cooled down enough to not get damaged.

One last thing on the OP: saying that "90% of the damaged 360 were attached to a power strip or surge protector for 6 to 12 months" is statistically meaningless to determine correlation by itself. It should be compared to the failure rate of consoles that were not attached to power strips or surge protectors.

I use a surge protector for my ps3/360. It has'nt caused me any trouble yet. I really don't have a choice though.

I have no choice but to use one since it's a US console and I have to plug it into a stepdown... that also acts as a surge protector.
Too bad if it dies due to not enough electricity, but plugging it directly would feed it way too much of it XD

Kind of crappy to design like that though, there are so many devices in homes these days, can't expect to have a separate wall outlet for each.

Why would the power remain low unless the power adaptors are flawed in some way? The typical power plug ought to be able to deliver at least 20A or 2400W which is far more than any one persons home theatre system ought to use. Maybe im wrong, I don't particularly understand it but from a general sense it doesn't quite make sense to me.

If the fans aren't spinning like they ought to due to a lack of current in a longer term situation then wouldn't the system also be unstable due to other errors cropping up? If that isn't the case then the fact still remains that the system itself draws half the power it did at launch so even if the fans are spinning with half the current they ought to have the system still should remain within the original specifications for heat due to natural conduction/convection and the far lower internal temperate of modern Jasper/Falcon units.

As far as I can tell it makes more sense that whilst theres a corelation between Xbox 360s and power bricks that there probably isn't any true causation to say theres a direct link between the two factors. I.E. Xbox 360s are connected to power adapters, Xbox 360s fail, but theres nothing I can really figure would cause a link between the two without some actual data proving this is the case. As Microsoft faces a large bill for warranty repairs if there is a causation link then they would be in their best interests to mention it.

Any power strip (with or without surge protection circuitry) is repartitioning its power intake to its output sockets. Even your barebones power strip (basically three wires that connect in parallel a number of sockets) can deliver fluctuating tensions as its innards can warp as they heat up and the electric contact between plug and socket can be less than optimally stable. Add to that some electronic acting as tension filters and you have a wider array of possible instabilty causes.

The power brick acts as a stabilizer (the frequency response that as I said I don't know details how it copes with differently fast variations of the input tension) but it doesn't generate power, thus it's quite irrelevant to the central issue.

That being what happens when the system is, for whatever reason, underfed. A good design would ensure that the chips never reach dangerous temperatures, throttling down the clock or even shutting down if they have to. In that sense, even instabilty - that will look like malfunctioning to a user - will be better than overheating the chip, which leads to the permanent hardware damage the knowledge base seems to be talking about.

Once again, I doubt very much that the power strips or surge protectors can be affecting the 360s all that much, but - regardless - the design of the innards of the console should be good enough to cope with extended shortages of power indipendently from the behaviour of the external brick.

"Surge protectors can cause this, and probably 90% of the consoles they see have all failed in 6-12 months of being plugged into a surge protector."

well, maybe they are plugged into a surge protector, because these people had power surges before and that was what killed the 360?

how i see it is, that the problem is not the surge protector, but rather the 360's power supply, that fails to provide stable voltage to the 360, regardless of minor fluctuations, something any modern Power supply should be capable of, as there will always be fluctuations in any power grid (i'm NOT talking Surges here)