My PS3 has just killed itself, playing Dark Souls I went to talk to someone and it cut out and the red light started flashing. Killed the power and turned it back on to find that it tries to turn on but gives up after 20 seconds and flashes red. It is well and truly dead, it is a launch day console so it has had a good life. Now for the bad news, I simply cannot afford to replace it any time soon. Christmas is too close and I have just spent £1000 on a sofa. I shall wait until the new year and then make a decision. Perhaps no more PS3 gaming for me.
Feeling adventurous? You could try reflowing the solder and reapplying the thermal paste. I resolved the RROD on my launch 360 by applying some arctic silver ceramique to the CPU and GPU. Might work here too. What have you got to lose? You're going to throw it in the trash anyway.
That's pretty shitty news. That means you've lost your saves too, unless you get it working or have backed them up. There's some Sainsburys deal at the moment which means you can get a new PS3 for £127 with a bit of trading in of the bundled games. Want me to find out more info on that?
Why don't you try the hairdryer trick? My mate has done it 4 times since his PS3 went YLOD and it works.
A heat gun works better than a hair dryer, but the heat gun also costs money. You could also try baking the motherboard in the oven. I know that works for video cards that need to be reflowed.
Did you have a recent backup/PSN+ saves uploaded to the cloud? Maybe you could ask for Replacement PS3 money for christmas. How long did your PS3 hold out in the end? Feels like 5 years.
March 2007 so nearly 5. I might try some of the fixes. A 160gb new costs £190 and I would rather get new than second hand so will hhave to save what I can over Xmas. I could get around £70 towards it by putting tales of vesperia on ebay but I would rather not. Edit: It died on the same day as Jimmy Savile, perhaps it is some sort of death pact.
Hold the press, its come back to life. I expect that just like Jesus this will be a brief second coming. Edit: very brief, it has frozen. Unlike before it will now boot before crashing. I wonder if the hdd could be at fault.
I know for a fact that you can bake the PS3 board in the oven for about 10 minutes. Two of my friends got another 6-8 months out of it that way. http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-fix-a-YLOD-PS3-with-an-oven/
Well you're the geeky sort, so resoldering the bits and thermal paste should be a piece of cake. If anything, hopefully it'll bring it back to life long enough for you to make a backup. Delete videos, downloaded games, music photos etc. You want game saves only, otherwise it'll take ages. Mine took about 12 hours.
that sofa better be the size of a queen size bed with electronic massage machines inside for me to spend over 2 grand on :/
Here's the some stuff on that Sainbury's deal taken from another forum: "Sainsburys are selling a 160GB PS3 and you can choose two games out of Battlefield 3, Fifa, or Lego Pirates of the Caribbean for £199. They are also hiding the LE BF3 in the back and if you can manage to get two copies of that that and aren't fussed about Battlefield in the slightest, CEX will give you £72 for both of them which means you just got the PS3 for £127" Of course, you could also sell the controller you get with it too; probably be able to get £20-25 for it. A broken BC PS3 can get around £50-60 on eBay. So if that all comes off, you'd get a new PS3 for around £50.
I gave it a full strip down and clean and now it will run for 1-3 minutes before crashing. Before the background would run slow when booting but now its quick but something is still not right. Don't have any thermal compound at home so will get some from work tomorrow before removing the heatsink and trying to get the solder to reflow. The fact that it boots up and runs fine before falling over makes me think that it could be something else as if the processor contacts were broken I wouldn't expect it to get that far. Some people say it could be the blu ray drive which might make sense as it failed sheen I tried to talk to someone and so it would have been loading from the disk at the time. Will give the solder reflow a go and move on from there. Edit: forgot to add I only had one screw left over when I had finished putting it back together which I regard as a sucess.
The hard drive may be another point of failure, whether it's not seated properly or something, I dunno. Only one screw? That is impressive.
I booted it with no hdd and it crashed after 30 seconds so I am not sure it is that. I have a spare in my car but I am worried if I try it and it isn't it will mean I can't put the old one back in to get my data as it will have seen a new one.
You should be able to swap between the two on the same PS3, I did this with my refurb 60gb model when I was diagnosing my second YLOD. It probably crashed because the PS3 no longer stores its entire OS on a flash chip, it's split between a smaller chip and HDD now.