PS3 broken then fixed!

The whole reason for me buying a PS3 three years ago was to avoid the Xbox red ring of death and to not pay for online gaming. Well, two days before a long Christmas vacation my PS3 gave me the yellow light of death! It's not a good thing when you hear the double beep and your PS3 turns off on its own. So I contemplated, do I buy a new PS3 slim (I have way too many games to give up the Sony brand)? Or do I send in my old PS3 to Sony to get looked at then get a refurbished model as a replacement. Mind you, my Modern Warfare 2 disc was stuck in the Blu-ray player and I had just bought The Hangover on Blu-ray the day before! Perfect timing right?

Hopefully you'll never see the inside of one of these!

After some reading and a friend of a friend's advice, I found out that it could be either the power supply (the PS3 would turn on, but shut itself back off, so doubtful), bad harddrive, or...the CPU/GPU could have lost contact with the motherboard due to years of  excessive heat. Ding ding ding. That is what it was. After watching a step by step tutorial on Youtube, my dad and I proceeded to tear the thing apart. The machine was broken anyway and out of warranty service, might as well give it a go. We tore it apart, bought a heat gun and heated the CPU/GPU chips for two minutes at 700 degrees (which supposedly resolders the chips back to the motherboard), then bought some silver arctic thermal grease from Radioshack, applied that to the heat sinks, and slapped the PS3 back together. Fingers crossed I hit the power button for a go. It worked! Nightmare resolved and it only cost me about 30 bucks! If this ever happens to you (heard the same happens to Xbox also), check it out on youtube and fix it yourself.

The infamous CELL processor