Trying to save myself a $100

I'm a month out of my Xbox 360 warranty... I had an issue with my xbox not reading a disc 5 or so months ago. However it stopped and i haven't had a problem with it since. So I didn't send it in...

I rented Arkham Asylum and everything was fine, bought Madden 10 and it went to ****. I went on the internetz and someone suggested I might need to clear my cache. i took the HD off and the game was readable. Hooked it back up and it was unreadable again. I cleared the Cache and everything was fine... Until today. All of my games are back to being unreadable (just want to add I notice a clicking sound when it tries to read a game... It might of always done that, I dunno. Maybe someone can let me know).

I called MS and they said it was $100 to fix...

So I want to red ring my 360. I've read you need to wrap towels around it. However most people said to put in a FPS because they require more power (usually). However my console won't read discs... so that's useless.

That said, what can I do to red ring it? Will having the console on, wrapped by itself do the trick? I don't want to screw with it and cause further problems if I'm SOL since I can't get enough power to RROD the console.

TIA.

EDIT: I read something about a magnet becoming unglued... Someone suggest picking the front end of the Xbox 360 up a bit and dropping it. I did it, and now the games are reading... So I think that's my issue. Either way, I don't think that's a long term fix... Just wanted to add, I think I know the problem.

 

You're telling me... My ****ty Xbox (original) kicked after (about) 3 years... I should of bought the extended warranty... I figured since RROD (the only major issue I've heard of) had a 3 year warranty, I'd be dumb to buy the EW.

It seems like every 360 has a year of playability until something ****s up. My nintendo's (NES, SNES) were durable as **** and PS2 was too. This generation of console's hasn't been impressive (minus the Wii, I haven't heard **** about failure rates from them).