PS3 Yellow Light of Death

WeasteDevil said:
There is no way that the heat of a hairdryer has done a thing, seriously, absolutely none. It's blown away some dust. The yellow light was probably because it couldn't crank the fan up.

Do you have any flux handy? Stick it in front of your hairdryer and tell me how long it takes to melt at 10cm distance.
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So why didnt it work after over 5 mins of heating it up? Surly after 5 mins any dust from the fan would have been removed?

Why did it only work after 10 mins of heating and 20 mins of cooling?

I blew air in directly. Most people wrapped their consoles in a jumper or towel, then heated the PS3 for longer. In those cases, air wasnt going directly into the system.

After 10 mins under the hairdryer, the console was really hot. I know know it was hot enough to resolder the joints.

If an Xbox can be brough back to life by wrapping it an towel, then why is heating a PS3 with a hairdryer for 10 mins so far fetched?
 
Thermal paste does not respond to heat, and everything I've seen about fixing the Yellow light thing has been pasting the heat covers of Cell and RSX and resettling the heat sinks back onto them. They were never pasted in the first place.

Secondly, there is no way that you can melt solder with a hairdryer from that distance without also melting the plastic. Not possible. The whole XB360 towel trick was to keep the heat inside, but the XB360 had a design fault that caused in certain circumstances its chips to jump off the motherboard due to it warping under the heat. The design of the PS3 is quite different. If anything, the claims are that the solder job was bad in the first place. A hairdryer is not going to solve a bad solder job.

As for you last point, by blowing so much air into the thing with the hairdryer, you put so much heat in there that the thing decided not even to crank up the fan in the first place.
 
As I said before, most people are wrapping their consoles with a towel or a jumper first. Therefore, airs not being pushed through the vents, so it can't be a case of simply blowing out the dust.

So, do you think this would have worked if I had put the dryer on cold? I doubt it somehow!
 
The chips inside it produce more heat when on than your hairdryer can. Also, why would it generate heat when it doesn't turn on in the first place? Give me some links to this, because I'm serious dubious. As I've said, the Watchdog thing and almost everything I've seen involves new thermal paste.

I'd suggest that you backup your data, and then take it to bits. I bet you that the fan is caked in dust after almost 3 years, it will be almost moulded to the fins. Don't use liquid to get it off FFS!

I already cleaned mine this summer when the fan was getting out of hand.
 
All i can say is that heating the PS3 made the base miles hotter than it would ever be after playing games, so i can only imagine that it would do the same to the chips. What that heat does, i dont know.

There is a vid of a guy doing it on youtube. Loads of people on forums have tried it and its worked. People say that this “fix” may only last for a short time.

So, i took the morning off work and went down to Gamestation while the PS3 was still alive.

I traded it in for £176. I bought a 250gb slim with Ratchet & Clank and Need For Speed for £285. So its cost me £109 and i have got two new games.

Much better than paying Sony £130 for a refurbished console with only 3 months warranty.
 
I've knocked my PS3 over twice and it still works like a charm. I got a message that came up when it restarted asking me if I'd like to report the problem to Sony.

Meanwhile, my Xbox...
 
gaffs said:
All i can say is that heating the PS3 made the base miles hotter than it would ever be after playing games, so i can only imagine that it would do the same to the chips. What that heat does, i dont know.

There is a vid of a guy doing it on youtube. Loads of people on forums have tried it and its worked. People say that this “fix” may only last for a short time.

So, i took the morning off work and went down to Gamestation while the PS3 was still alive.

I traded it in for £176. I bought a 250gb slim with Ratchet & Clank and Need For Speed for £285. So its cost me £109 and i have got two new games.

Much better than paying Sony £130 for a refurbished console with only 3 months warranty.
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Did you back up all of your stuff and deactivate your account on it? I suppose the shop will do that though?

I know what you're saying about the heat, but I suppose the fan wasn't on, so the heat you were blowing into it wasn't getting out. The odd thing is, it's the fan at the base, the motherboard is in the middle of the old models. It's upside down sat on the fan. I still reckon that it was a fan bother, but we'll never know.
 
Sc40les said:
I've knocked my PS3 over twice and it still works like a charm. I got a message that came up when it restarted asking me if I'd like to report the problem to Sony.

Meanwhile, my Xbox...
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There was an electricity cut last week, and it told me off for not shutting it down properly. New firmware out today funnily enough, in regard to Gaff's problem. One thing they've done is add the feature to connect two PS3s together and copy all of you data from one to the other, deleting everything on the source PS3 that is under DRM (downloaded games, etc.) in the process. Some save files can't be backed up using the normal method (they are locked to the machine), so hopefully Gaff's didn't have any of those.
 
KanieKaned said:
BUMPAGE

Now onto my 3rd ps3 as my second one went capput last night whilst playing MW2 load of cock :mad: Bloody thing was only 6 months old
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:lol: sorry to laugh buts thats mental.

My first one is dying for the last 3 months. Works fine with PES, half works with Modern warfare but the annoying thing is Ive Uncharted 2 and couple of other new games and it just wont load them at all. fecking head melter
 
Lance Uppercut said:
Is this an issue with the slim models?
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Is what an issue? Shit breaks. ;)

I have a few tips for you though.

A) Make a back up.

B) Stress test the feck out of it. Stick in something like GT5 and let it run non-stop for a week. If it handles that, it's likely never to go pop - not the mobo in any case - BD drives are something else.

C) Stick a vacuum cleaner on the vents every two weeks.

D) After you have been playing for a long time - don't turn it straight off - go back to the XMB and wait for 10 minutes, let the fan ramp down and get the heat out.

E) When the fan starts to go mental on a regular basis, open it up and clean it - very easy with the slim, because it's on the top.

F) Give the thing plenty of room to breathe, it really does need the air.

G) Don't drop it.
 
Little over 3 years for my one.I must look into giving it a proper clean out though. All to often the fan likes to rev up to try and dispell heat.

Still going strong though despite my thinking it can go kaput at any minute
 
WeasteDevil said:
Is what an issue? Shit breaks. ;)

I have a few tips for you though.

A) Make a back up.

B) Stress test the feck out of it. Stick in something like GT5 and let it run non-stop for a week. If it handles that, it's likely never to go pop - not the mobo in any case - BD drives are something else.

C) Stick a vacuum cleaner on the vents very two weeks.

D) After you have been playing for a long time - don't turn it straight off - go back to the XMB and wait for 10 minutes, let the fan ramp down and get the heat out.

E) When the fan starts to go mental on a regular basis, open it up and clean it - very easy with the slim, because it's on the top.

F) Give the thing plenty of room to breathe, it really does need the air.

G) Don't drop it.
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Thanks. I've already been keeping it on after I finish playing to let it cool down. I started doing that after you mentioned it.

I haven't done the vacuum thing, but I'll start now. I'm a bit wary about the stress testing, simply because I don't like to leave things on when I'm not home. I always assume I'll arrive back to a smoking shell.

Backing shit is up something that I haven't done, but will do today. Haven't noticed any issues with the fan going nuts yet. Hopefully I don't.
 
WeasteDevil said:
What do you do to them exactly? :lol:
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Just play games on it weaste nout else

WeasteDevil said:
Is what an issue? Shit breaks. ;)

I have a few tips for you though.

A) Make a back up.

B) Stress test the feck out of it. Stick in something like GT5 and let it run non-stop for a week. If it handles that, it's likely never to go pop - not the mobo in any case - BD drives are something else.

C) Stick a vacuum cleaner on the vents every two weeks.

D) After you have been playing for a long time - don't turn it straight off - go back to the XMB and wait for 10 minutes, let the fan ramp down and get the heat out.

E) When the fan starts to go mental on a regular basis, open it up and clean it - very easy with the slim, because it's on the top.

F) Give the thing plenty of room to breathe, it really does need the air.

G) Don't drop it.
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Ive been doing pretty much every one of these since i got my 2nd one weaste, everything bar drop it and the one about opening it up to get at the fan. Yet it still went within six months im not too pissed off as ive got cover on it from the store and they have already swapped it out and its up and running.

But seeing the machine die whilst just lying idle on a screen in MW2 and the yellow light appear again was a little horrific

Thankfully I got the MW2 disc back out of it after it died
 
KanieKaned said:
Just play games on it weaste nout else



Ive been doing pretty much every one of these since i got my 2nd one weaste, everything bar drop it and the one about opening it up to get at the fan. Yet it still went within six months im not too pissed off as ive got cover on it from the store and they have already swapped it out and its up and running.

But seeing the machine die whilst just lying idle on a screen in MW2 and the yellow light appear again was a little horrific

Thankfully I got the MW2 disc back out of it after it died
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How did you do that?

I couldn't get mine out when that happened and it took them a few months to get it back to me for some reason?
 
I wouldn't have a clue, but if it's a yellow light problem, maybe you could press the eject button when it's in standby? The eject button turns it on if a disc is in, and it spits the disc out before booting. Just a guess.
 
WeasteDevil said:
I wouldn't have a clue, but if it's a yellow light problem, maybe you could press the eject button when it's in standby? The eject button turns it on if a disc is in, and it spits the disc out before booting. Just a guess.
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I tried that and the ps3 light went back to yellow before it had time to spit it out.
 
Weaste, I'm currently backing up my shit on to a 1000GB external harddrive (my USB stick was nowhere near large enough). Am I going to have any problems retrieving it if my PS3 fecks up?
 
Decotron said:
Dont forget to back up your trophies and accolades aswell.
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I'm not quite sure what the point of the whole trophy thing is, to be honest. I collect trophies as a consequence of beating games, but I don't play games specifically to earn them. Is there any benefit to earning them other than pride?
 
ben_united said:
How did you do that?

I couldn't get mine out when that happened and it took them a few months to get it back to me for some reason?
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I know this works on 40gb machines not sure about 60gb ones:

Turn the machine off at the back.

put your finger on the disc eject button and hold it there.

now power on the machine it should spit out the disc and the fan will start going into like a test mode it will shut down soon after
 
Bump

We've just had the old Yellow death light on ours, will try the vacuum and see if it's dust related, but not holding out much hope for that.
 
I got the YLOD on mine last year and was told that it wasn't that the console had overheated, but the sensor that triggers the automatic shut off if the console gets too hot had broken, hence the reason it wouldn't turn back on despite being left to cool down. The guy at Sony told me all of this before I'd even sent it for repair (I ended up with a refurbished one in the end) so I gathered that it was a common problem. Could this have been the case or was the guy at Sony a gimp?
 
Vacing it out after the event is not really going to help. The trouble with the yellow light is that it can mean a lot of different things also. The yellow light means a general hardware failure that the machine has detected, it could be something wrong with the power supply, it could be solder coming loose.

As for the guy at Sony, the machine turning itself off when hot should not cause a yellow light, it would simply shut down as a PC would do in a similar situation.

@ EdWeatherall, if you are going to open it up, and it's a fat model, first you need a specific type of screwdriver to get the case off, the fan is at the very bottom, so you will have to totally dismantle the thing, so be careful.
 
Brother took it back to the shop and used Sales of Goods Act, i didn't think it would be as easy as that, but they gave him a brand new 250gb one.

Disappointing to lose the saves and the game which was in, but I guess it's a lesson learnt on backing up save files
 
EdWeatherall said:
Brother took it back to the shop and used Sales of Goods Act, i didn't think it would be as easy as that, but they gave him a brand new 250gb one.

Disappointing to lose the saves and the game which was in, but I guess it's a lesson learnt on backing up save files
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What shop was it and I remember Weaste mentioning something about the sales of goods act. What exactly did your brother do? Did he have to quote the exact article of the act to get it replaced?
 
Gamestation

I don't think it was the exact article, but he had printed something off in case they questioned it

But to be honest, it's the law, it's 6yrs and the thing was only 2 and a half years old. I thought they'd send him up the chain to their head office or if he was lucky give him a refurbished one. So, was definitely surprised they gave him a brand new 250gb one

He said the first guy he spoke to told him that it was Sony's problem so contact them, but we'd looked around online and knew it was the retailers responsibility, so the next person he spoke to there just accepted it, I'm sure they get a lot of these problems, and she said my brother was right but they didn't have any at that shop, so they had to go to Hyde instead.

He says they didn't even check the PS3 or the box or anything, just took his word that it was knackered
 
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