Wild Blue Sky

I cannot condone this behavior.  However, I was desperate.

This past Black Friday (good timing) my ‘fat’ PS3 decided to shut off in the middle of marathon run of Borderlands.  It happened while it was loading a new area, so I thought maybe it just crashed.  Turned it back on, and after about 2 minutes it beeped and shut off again.  I tried a few more times before giving up and asking the almighty Google what the problem might be.

The more I read, the more I started to suspect heat issues.  That diagnosis made sense – if I left the unit off for some length of time, I could get maybe 10-15 minutes out of it before it’d die on me.   I hoped that would be long enough for a transfer of all my save data.
It was not.

A common problem with these older models is the thermal compound they use between the CPU/GPU and heatsink.  I figured I could at least try that.  What’s the worst that could happen?  I’m out $5 worth of Arctic Silver and some of my time.

There’s surprisingly little to the PS3 inside.  Almost the entire bottom half of the unit is heatsink and fan.  Once the case is cracked, the bluray drive, power-supply, hard drive, and a bit of wireless gear is removed, the mainboard and heatsink are pretty easy to get at.  There are all sorts of ‘quick fixes’ floating around using hairdryers, standing it on end, putting the whole thing in the oven, etc.  Forget those, take the thing apart.  Give it a good cleaning while you’re at it.

Once I got the mainboard off the heatsink, I could see exactly what everyone was talking about.  The thermal compound had turned into this chaulky gunk.  Being the backyard do-it-yourselfer, I looked into my universal toolkit and pulled out some WD-40 to clean it off.  After cleaning the excess and letting it dry awhile, I decided to throw the mainboard in the oven for a bit.  Some people have reported success with ‘reflowing’ the board – heating the solder just enough to get it to flow back where it is supposed to be.  Normally they use a heat gun for this (a hairdryer won’t get hot enough) but again, I used what I had handy.  I don’t encourage you to follow me.

After letting it cool then applying new thermal compound, I put everything back together.  I haven’t really stress-tested it since, but it stayed on overnight and completed the system transfer just fine.  I’m not sure I’d trust it for much more than a bluray player at this point, or as a secondary one for gatherings… but at least my backwards compatible, 4 USB port having, memory card reading PS3 still lives.  For now.

The Guts

Back Together. Yuengling Optional - but highly reccomended

Wow I’ve been busy.

First of all, I think I’ve been to more sporting events in the last 6 months than I have in the last couple of years. Hockey games, Reds game, even made it to the Bengals/Steelers game (stupid Bengals!!) And, not that this is normally my thing, but I went and saw The Nutcracker too Hey, I’m all cultured and crap. Just seems like I’ve had something going on almost every weekend the last two months. By design I guess.

Just been a strange time. Made a few new friends, lost a couple of old ones (and I’m still not sure why.) Hell, even made the first step towards changing careers – that starts in January, maybe more on that at a later date. Had you asked me at the beginning of the year where I’d be at this point, this is pretty far from where I would have guessed I’d be.

For the first time in 11 years, I actually didn’t make a single jump this year. I didn’t really get my bike out that much either. Got more into other stuff though I guess – played a lot of disc golf (I’m actually getting halfway decent at it) and got a couple people hooked on Geocaching. I’ve created a monster there – Treeboy already has more ‘finds’ in 6 weeks than I probably had in the first year or so that I did it. And he’s already hid one and has another doozie planned.

I can’t believe Christmas is a week away. I’ve bought one thing. Uhg.

Well… it should be an exciting couple of months. Let’s see where it goes.

So I’m glad I didn’t hold my breath – it did take 10 months – but you can all stop giving Craig dirty looks now My Boot – Futon

… I don’t spend that many Saturdays at Home Depot anymore.

… and he’s looking at you, Facebook.

Facebook continues its all-out assault on its users’ privacy with the new Places feature, which is (of course) on by default, with no warning. Lifehacker has the lowdown, including how to turn it off. As I’ve said before, if you dig Facebook, I’m not going to give you a hard time about it, but I strongly encourage you to turn this feature off. The world doesn’t need to know where you live, and when you are (and aren’t) home. Also: Fuck you, Facebook, for turning this on by default and not warning your users about it. You’re one of the most profoundly immoral companies in the history of the Internet.

Yeah, reason 424 I’m not on Facebook.

My neighbor just showed up (second one today) to ask me a computer question.  I’m even wearing my “No I will not fix your computer” shirt.  It didn’t help.