I thought it was pretty cool when I upgraded my system software to 3.00, it had a whole new look, and some fun new features. But when I tried playing some disc games, like dead space, while I was having a sleep over. It started just weirding out; it would randomly say cannot read disc, or sometimes very specifically, at one part it would just crash or slow down. So I thought ‘well I’ll just upgrade the firmware’... Baad idea, as soon as I upgraded to 3.01, it wouldn’t do Anything with discs, no CDs, DVDs, BluRays/Games.. Nothing. Except, the tiny blue light that appears when you insert a disc, so why was it recognizing the disc but not reading it..
I’d say I’m pretty savvy with computers and the like, and when I got this playstation it had a broken laser, which I replaced with a brand new one. So my first thought was ‘I got a cheap laser’, but I wasn’t ready to conclude that yet. The first thing I tried was taking apart the disc drive and cleaning the lens, which, of course made it worse (Not even the little blue light was coming on). As a friend of mine told me, however,that I had used the wrong kind of wipe; I needed a lens wipe. So he gave me a couple and I used those and it did put it did indeed bring the light back, still nothing virtual. So I looked a few things up, turns out 90% of the people who care to say anything about it, forums and the like, had the same problem as soon as they hit 3.00 and up, but the other 10% were people with different PlayStations. Also someone that worked at sony explained the possibility that it was indeed a system software problem, but I still wasn’t ready to make a diagnoses. So then I started looking up ways to diagnose a PlayStations hardware, Nothing. A few weeks later, a friend of mine asked me if I could try to fix his ps3, I said sure, and asked him if he didn’t mind if I tested some of his hardware against mine, and he said no not at all. So, as I disassembled his PS3, I set the disc drive aside, one that I knew was reading discs Fine. So once I got too a break, I took the lid off of mine and swapped the disc drives, plugged it in and turned it on. It was a little different so I was worried that it might not read it simply because it was a different model, but, besides the fully automatic feature (Versus mine which is only about 50%, you push it in a ways and it grabs it about half way) it did exactly the same thing, after it pulled the disc in the little blue light came on but no virtual disc.
At this point I have a pretty solid diagnoses that A, my disc drive was still working fine and B, it is indeed Sony’s system update that has rendered my playstation useless too it’s most bragged features. And here is their fix, and obviously my playstation is out of warranty, you send it too them and pay them 150$ (half the price, now, of a brand new one) to “have it fixed”. But I have come to find out that all that means is they send you a refurbished one with a 3 month warranty. What is this sony? You give us a cheap product that costs 100$ more then your competition, then expect us too pay to have it fixed/replaced.
I haven’t even gotten too the YLOD (Yellow Light Of Death), when you get this said yellow light on your playstation it Basically means your playstation is dead for good. For those willing too take a little risk, depending on what you consider risk considering your playstation is now dead and probably out of warranty, you can try and fix it. So let me explain what happens happens when you get the YLOD, or rather what it means. Lets start with price, when the PS3 came out, it was what? 600$, and that includes a blu-ray player (aside from the playstation was probably 600$ by itself) a “Next Generation Gaming System” which, again, besides the playstation was about 250 - 300$, and how many other things?
This means that sony simply couldn’t afford to make it Right, so, rewind; everything in it is as cheap as it gets, including the solder holding the connections between the GPU/CPU in place (for those of you wondering that’s your Central Processing Unit and your Graphics Processing unit, 2 of the most important parts to a gaming system, or any computer for that matter) and so when an individual plays their playstation for hours at a time it overheats this solder, and detaches these two pieces from the motherboard, microscopically, but enough too render them useless.
That about ends my rant for the month.
Thanks for reading, email me if you have any questions (amr9000@gmail.com)
