The mid-to-late 2000s were a scary time to be an Xbox gamer, with the infamous Red Ring of Death claiming countless consoles seemingly without warning. While Microsoft extended warranties and upgraded chipsets amid the console-killing plague, desperate console owners scrambled for their own homemade solutions. Forums and websites (this one included) filled with talk of the "towel trick," "heat sink replacement instructions," and "X-clamp repair kit sets."

Amid all this chatter, apparently, GameStop has been working on its own industrialized solution for the problem, repairing and reselling red-ringed systems as "refurbished" since 2009.

As part of an excellent Bloomberg Businessweek report on the state of GameStop in an increasingly digital gaming world, author Joshua Brustein talks about how the gaming retail giant developed and industrialized a method for turning broken, red-ringed Xbox 360 units into resellable, "refurbished" systems.

A boon for GameStop in 2009 was figuring out how to solve the so-called Red Ring of Death, a faulty connection between the chip and motherboard that rendered Xbox 360 consoles useless. GameStop’s R&D team discovered that the problem could be solved by heating up the top of the device while cooling it from below, reconnecting a damaged chip to the motherboard without ruining it. The fix is now regularly carried out by a $10-per-hour laborer operating a machine that GameStop built itself. A refurbished console can be sold at close to its original price.

While a 2012 Verge piece on GameStop's repair operation suggests that GameStop employees "aren't supposed to accept trade-ins of Xbox 360 systems with the [red ring of death]," there are numerous anecdotal reports of local outlets accepting red-ringed systems for as much as $85 of trade-in credit in recent years. Fixing those "worthless" systems and reselling them for hundreds of dollars would be a profit center for any company.

Still, there's some reason to believe that GameStop's red ring solution might be more of a temporary band-aid than a permanent repair. The method as described in Businessweek sounds like a more professional version of the famous towel trick, which used a trapped heat and cooling cycle to re-melt solder on the damaged graphics chip. That's usually enough to get a system working again for hours or even months more, but consoles revived with this kind of heating method almost always fail again at some point thanks to the inherent design flaws of the motherboard, according to numerous reports.

Perhaps GameStop's repair solution is somehow more robust and long-lasting than this kind of trick, but without a fuller heat sink replacement (which requires opening up the system), it seems likely that those GameStop-refurbished systems are destined to see the red rings once more. Don't worry, though—GameStop will extend the standard 30-day warranty on that refurbished system to a year, for a price. As always, when buying a "repaired" gadget, caveat emptor.