Fixing your XBOX 360 Play and Charge Kit

Tentative instructions for getting your play and charge kit to start charging again.

Before you start:

It will only start charging when you’ve left the battery pack with a “red light” charge signal. This means when you first plug in the controller, and the light on the cable connection goes red, the signal is saying that it needs to be charged. The problem comes when it thinks it is charged and switches off or to a green colour.

To get the red signal:

1) Plug the charging cable into the xbox, and switch the xbox on without the controller attached to the cable.

2) Plug the controller into the cable, once the dashboard has booted and you’ve signed in.

3) Wait until the cable connection light goes red, and then switch off the controller (hold down the 360 button and select “Turn Off Controller” from the menu).

4) Restart the xbox (or if you live close by to someone else with a 360, turn that console on with a cable plugged in, wait for it to boot to the dashboard, and then attach your controller – the light should stay red).

5) Plug in the controller once the dashboard has booted again.

This might be fiddly and not work every time. It’s a case of trial and error most of the time. I will keep playing about with the procedure, but for the time being this seems to work for me.

Alternative Strategy:

For this strategy to work, you need to have the xbox set to go into low power mode to charge it when you switch it off.

1) Boot up the xbox with the play and charge cable plugged in but no controller attached.

2) After plugging in the controller to the cable, it will for a very short while turn red: when it does this, press the power button on the front of the xbox.

3) Very occassionally, it will stay red, flash green (when the xbox goes into low power mode to charge the controller) and then go back to red until it’s finished charging. The down side to this method is that you can’t play with your xbox whilst it’s in low power mode, and turning the xbox back on resets the charging of the controller.