PS3 - Yellow Light of Death

A Playstation 3, Xbox360, or Wii is a big investment for anyone to make. I hate to sound like an old lady trying to get unruly kids off her lawn, but back in the day these systems didn't cost quite as much and quite frankly lasted forever. I still see Sega Dreamcasts and those old Nintendos that work perfectly at the flea market on Sundays, yet Sony and Microsoft both seem unable to deliver systems that don't kick the bucket after a few years,over the past two generations. I have gone through at least 3 PS2s and had an original Xbox that died a fairly quick death.

Knock on wood, I have been able to avoid the Red Ring of Death by making sure the 360 doesn't stay on for long periods of time, vacuuming out the fan vents, and making sure it's always free of blockage when the system is on to keep everything vented properly.

Our PS3 was not a release system, but pretty close. I found myself with troubles with it from the get go, but usually a system reset fixed it. Then the Yellow Light of Death came to town. It pretty much completely disables the system due to solder letting go on one of the components inside the machine. Since I was unable to back up most of my saves due to copy protection (another unacceptable and unreasonable issue I have with Sony, but that is for another post) I was not alright with just buying another system and moving on with life. This was not like the PS2 where you just pulled your save card out of the slot and jammed it into the new system and was able to keep playing without missing a beat. All my saves were on the dead PS3. Hundreds of hours of game play was going to be lost with the machine.

Witness the horror of the Yellow Light of Death!

So I took matters into my own hands. This is not to say that I condone that any of you do what I did, but I do want to encourage you to not give up if you find yourself in this same position and find your own solution.

I opened up my PS3, taking it apart bit by bit, and re-soldered the piece that had come undone. I followed a video on youtube on how to do it. It was not easy. It was a huge pain in the ass, really. I had to buy a special star screwdriver for one of the screws they put in the casing, buy thermal paste, and borrow a heat gun from a friend. When I put it back together I had about 3 screws that didn't make it back to where they belonged.

When the 'fix' was done the system still didn't 'work' in that we couldn't play games. The fan was not working properly now, but I was able to use the dashboard operating system, including the data transfer and that was the most important thing.

Self fixes for PS3s only last so long before the ylod comes back. At best you might get a month or two out of self fix even if you are good enough with electronics to make it work completely again. I took the ylod as a sign to start saving up a few bucks to buy a new PS3 and just played the 360 in the meantime.

Last night my husband finally won the battle that we have had every week for the past few weeks of "Do we have enough to buy the PS3 yet?". He is dying to play Tiger Woods 2011 with the PS3's Move capabilities. So we got the PS3 320 gb with Move bundle. We bought it at Walmart. Not sure how it happened, but I was only charged $349 for it, though even Walmart's website says the package is $399. Mistake or roll back, I wasn't about to complain! I saved $50!

As soon as we got home, the transfer of data began. It was probably foolish of me to begin this process at 8PM, but I knew this was the right way to do it. After system updates (both systems must been upgraded to the most recent version in order for the transfer to work) I started the transfer through a LAN cable.

A word of warning: If you decide to take this particular activity on, please do know that the 'estimated time until finish' is a lie, just like The Cake. I saw '5 minutes left' for about 45 minutes. I looked around online and had read that it 'freezes' for long periods of time, but to just be patient and leave it alone and it would eventually finish, and that was the truth. Yummy sweet truth, with frosting!

Though the wait is the truth...

Of course once this was all done and I put in the Tiger Woods game, that also had a 45 minute download to upgrade the game for Move compatibility, so there was not actually PLAYING done on the PS3 last night. It was after midnight and I had had enough, yet tonight when I go home there is a lot to be explored. I did not have time to check to make sure all my game saves had transferred, nor did I check to make sure all my DLC was available.

Overall, Sony gets an 'F' for ease of allowing consumers to copy saves from their systems in case of system failure, but I would give them a 'C' for ease of entire system transfer between two working PS3s. Of course I retain the right to change that grade if I go home tonight and all my data is missing despite a two and a half hour data transfer.