Flights of Angels.

Not a PS3

I don’t get misty-eyed over technology very often, but it’s hard not to lament the passing of my Playstation 3. I’ve had this bad boy for quite a while now, having bought it on the first vacation that I took back home to Virginia after joining GameSpot back in 2004. So, that would place the purchase in the summer of 2007 or so. As I recall, Best Buy was running some kind of crazy $50 or $100-off deal that summer, and, having avoided the rather crazy original purchase price of the console, I decided to lay down my money and finally join the Blu-Ray Revolution.

All good things come to an end, though, and it looks like whatever crazy stuff that running GTAV does to a PS3 was finally the bullet in the head of my little workhorse. My girlfriend’s out of town, so I bought GTAV yesterday in the hopes of having some free time to spend on it this weekend, but unfortunately fate intervened. No more than half an hour after starting the game (I was getting into Franklin’s car after delivering the repossessed cars to the dealership), everything died rather violently, with the red LED on the system flashing over and over. I thought at first that something had just overheated, but nope: attempting to turn the system back on simply resulted in the infamous green light - yellow light of death - flashing red light sequence. My system’s gone on to the next world.

It’s hard for me to guess whether I’ve used my PS3 or my X360 more this generation. Certainly both of them have lagged pretty far behind my PC, but they both still have their uses. I prefer the 360’s controller slightly, but the PS3 had the advantage of being a better media center, especially since it ran so quiet and had a Blu-Ray drive. Honestly, I’ve probably used it more for playing Blu-Ray movies than I have for running exclusive games on it, but it’s still been a great device for checking out the inFamouses and Uncharteds of the last decade.

a PS3

Unfortunately its death leaves me without a Blu-Ray player for the moment, and since I prefer to get my Netflix discs in that format, I’m suddenly faced with a rather depressing lack of HD disciness in my life for the next couple of months, and possibly longer: I wasn’t exactly intending to nab either of the new consoles at launch.

So, what does an idiot like me? Order an ifixit repair kit, of course! I would’ve just bought a new PS3, but, you know - $50 versus $230. Pretty easy decision to at least try the repair kit first and see if it helps before plunging all the way into purchasing a brand new console that’s only going to get used for a couple of months. I guess I could’ve always just bought a Blu-Ray player, but still, that wouldn’t fix the goddamn copy of GTAV sitting around, taunting me. Like a...like a dirty taunter.

Anyway, apparently these things take something like three hours to open up, apply new thermal paste stuff, and reseal, so that should be an interesting use of my weekend. Will update with pictures later if I don’t wind up throwing the whole damn thing out the window. I probably will, given that I just now looked at one of the guides for repairing one of these things, and it’s 50 goddamn steps long. Should be fun to grow a few more gray hairs this weekend.