What to do with old power supplies?

2 overheated xbox power supplies in less than a week..what am I doing wrong?

• first off I just want to clarify that my xbox 360 is a limited edition mw3 one and I had it imported from the US because it's quite expensive where I live. The first power supply I got blew up right off the bat, I then did some research and found that xbox power supply is not so adaptable to voltage converter so I went out to my local gaming store and bought a new one that worked great, for 3-4 days only...after that my xbox just shut down while I was playing dead space 2 and there was an orange light in the power supply and would only turn on for 1 sec and then die again. so I posted a question here yesterday "if you had seen and answered it thank you very much, some tips actually worked for a bit but the xbox still died after 3 min instead of 1 sec" and I got some pretty good answers but the console still shuts down. eventually I went out again today and got another power supply but now am too scared to turn on the damn thing lol I turned it on for a sec to get the CD out and turned it back off real quick just to ask you guys what I was doing wrong for the power supply to get overheated like that. Here is how my xbox was placed in my room. Xbox standing vertically and had about 2-3 centimeters space between it and the book shelf wall (after doing the research I found out that this was bad and could cause red ring of death but would it also damage the power supply?) power supply placed behind my TV but there was a lot of free space back there. power supply was kept plugged in even when not playing. (I also hear this is bad) Right now however I have it sitting horizontally on top of my dvd player, is it a bad position? the dvd player isn't on though so I don't think it can heat the xbox.

• Answer:

  3 questions which are also the solution-- Are you keeping the xbox in the sleeping position or the standing? If you are dont as it blocks the holes which are meant for the heat to escape. Do you use the switch board box which divides the power coming in into multiple channels? It causes the xbox heated no reason that i know tho but it does somehow. Do you keep it on through the days just so that you dont have to on the switch? It is another reason for it if you see and happens probably if you have a lot of voltage fluctuations then its just bad also it happens if your adapter is quite old mine had to be replaced 2wice since 2007 for that reason Also if youre using a chipped version or an incorrectly Jtagged one...the fan probably stops working at times resulting to that Try putting it near an air conditioner while playing