Finally Found a Problem

     After three years my beloved PlayStation 3 kicked the bucket (much to the pleasure of my XBox 360 owning friends).  My system happened to be in the less than half of one percent of the systems out there to receive the YLOD, or Yellow Light of Death.  The YLOD is considered the PS3 equivalent of the 360's Red Ring of Death (RROD).  For those of you unfamiliar with what the YLOD looks like, there's a standby/power light on the front of the system.  Standby is red, power on is green.  Mine would go from red, to green for a second then beep three times, turn yellow, and blink red until you turned off the system.  Uh-oh.  After much Googling I determined it was mostly hopeless.  Apparently this is caused by long term overheating and it melts away the solder on the GPU and/or the CPU chip on the motherboard.  I tried a few "safe" tricks to try and revive my system but nothing worked and I'm nowhere near competent enough to try and solder the chips back into place.  Worst of all, I had a game stuck in there (NBA 2K11, in case you were wondering).  So now what?

     Sony's policy is that their systems are perfect and never break and they will vehemently deny that the YLOD or the problem it's caused by exist.  Interesting, considering that they are the ones that would have had to program the system to show the yellow light in the first place.  But here's where it really sucks.  Unlike Microsoft who decided that since so many systems were dropping like flies all the time and therefore have a more or less free replacement service (plus you keep your hard drive) Sony... doesn't.  Sony apparently makes you pay upwards of $150 to ship your system back in its entirety (wires and all) and then they send you a refurbished system instead of fixing yours.  And if you have a game stuck inside it?  You can get it back... after months of phone calls and emails and begging.  This is all according to the online forums and previous PS3 owner's experiences.  I decided that I would just avoid the headache and put my 80gb system to sleep and go buy a new one. 

     I went out and purchased a brand new 250 gb PS3 Slim (I wanted the 320gb but Target was all out and everywhere else was closed and I didn't want to wait).  It was the Toy Story bundle which was kind of cool.  I got the first two movies on Blu Ray which went to the family and then I kept the Toy Story 3 game.  Now that I officially had a new PS3 I didn't have to worry about what I did to or with the old one.  I needed to get my game out of the console which meant surgery.  I peeled back the "do not peel" sticker that violates your one year warranty (of a three year old system - I think I'm safe) and took the system apart.  It was kind of cool and I meant to take pictures to show you but I couldn't find my camera (sorry).  The disk drive was staring me in the face and after I unplugged it from the motherboard I could see that further unscrewing would be needed.  I removed the necessary screws and opened the first case.  Now I could see part of my disc, but it was still under another inner shell.  Once again I grabbed my screwdriver and four screw later I could retrieve my game!  There was only one more obstacle left.

     I then set off on the quest of trying to retrieve my saved game data from my old system and put it on my new system.  Should be easy enough right?  WRONG!  My guess was that Sony would have designed their hard drives much like XBox, where you can unplug yours from your system and put it in your friends system and play your files on his system.  Makes sense right, basically makes your hard drive a really big memory card like we had for the PS2.  So I took the hard drive out of my old system, took the hard drive out of the new system and immediately noticed something wrong.  The two hard drives were oriented in the opposite direction, one length wise and one width wise.  Not having and engineering skills at all I didn't even bother trying to see how to remedy this and set off on Plan B.  Plan B was to find a working older version PS3 that I could use to put my old hard drive in and do the easy data transfer outlined on the PS3 Slim's box.  But where to find one of those?  It helps to have a neighbor who has one.  So I gave him a call and he let me borrow his system and I took it home and was all excited and switched the hard drives and plugged it in to get the thing going and.... uh-oh.  In order to allow my hard drive to work in his system I had to format it to his system because apparently Sony didn't go the Microsoft method.  So now I have all of my information on a perfectly good hard drive forever stuck in cyber space. 

     While I still would buy a PS3 99 times out of 100 over an XBox 360 (that one other time I'm assuming that every store is out of PS3's and I don't have another choice) I am rather disappointed in Sony for taking their time to release their system in order to make it "perfect" and then still have that problem malfunction irreparably.  I'm confused as to why, when the 360 had been on the shelves for a full year before the PS3 that they didn't look at the 360 and say "wow interchangeable hard drives, there's an idea!" and do it!  So while my brand loyalty to Sony still exists, it's a little shaken.  Here's to hoping the PS4 will be even "perfecter."