Xbox – more quickly recover from a melee / reload / equipment use

You can't use your xbox live account on multiple machines to prevent people sharing accounts. By forcing you to recover your gamertag every time you move to a different machine it greatly discourages people from sharing accounts.

This is by design, an enormous pain in the butt, but prevents microsoft from having to detect an account logged on two places at once.

Microsoft recommends for people who go back and forth to store your xbox live gamertag on a portable harddrive, this means you don't have to recover you gamertag ever again! By storing it on a USB you can ensure your gaming session is as quick as possible :D

Recommendation

You need to get a Hard Drive Transfer cable which will copy everything, including your save games, onto the 360 slim (assuming there is enough room on it). You don't need the bricked 360, just it's hard drive and the new slim xbox. You can also do this with just a USB drive, but will take longer depending on how much you've got to transfer.

If you've purchased a new Xbox 360 console, you can transfer everything (games, videos, music, saved games, gamertags, and even your hard-won achievements) to your new console!

There are two options available for moving your precious information. You can either use the Xbox 360 Hard Drive Transfer Kit to move everything to your new console, or connect a USB thumb drive if you only have a small amount of content such as your gamertag and saved games.

As you'll only use it once, my advice would be to buy one off ebay where you can then sell it again after you've used it for near enough what you paid for it.

As for the xbox itself, it sounds like it's overheated and the graphics card has started to warp and come off the motherboard. This problem can usually be fixed by clamping the card back down via a bit of DIY and a few bolts. If you don't fancy doing it, there's usually a few people on ebay that do this themselves and would be willing to offer you some cash for it ;)