Reballing

I'm going to be posting here again soon, mainly as a discussion of video games. I've been kind of delayed in doing this, however, since my PS3 died. it's a smaller known issue as compared to the RROD on the Xbox 360, but the occasional PS3 will, after quite some time of being played, experience an issue referred to as the Yellow light of death (YLOD). the problem is caused, in essence, beacuse the solder used in on the PS3 is, by law, not allowed to contain lead as no toy sold to children can contain lead, meaning that Sony uses a silver based solder that weakens over time when it is repeatedly heated. y'know, like when the system is run for any length of time. so, eventually cracks form in the solder, leading the gpu to overheat, and the system to YLOD. the good news is that this IS fixable. there are two methods, reballing, and reflowing. reflowing is usually only a temporary solution, at least as far as I've read. it involves reheating the solder, and applying more to the cracked areas. obviously this doesn't exactly fix the problem, as the original solder may, and often does, crack again. the more permanent solution is reballing, in which the solder is removed, and replaced with a lead based solder. Sony will repair your system if you send it back to them, and it's still under warranty, however, in many cases it's more efficient for them to send you a refurbished system than to repair your old one. not that they don't repair any systems, but it is sometimes easier to send out a refurbished one. additionally, Sony doesn't stock parts for older generations of PS3s, such as the first generations, and in these cases, you'll often be offered a PS3 slim. which would be all well and good, except that those first generation PS3s, and only the 60gb models if my memory serves correctly, had the ability to play old PS2 games. the backwards comparability has since been removed from the newer versions. so, if, like me, you have an old PS3 that you use to play old PS2 games, you can't really send it to Sony. and that's where I'm at. I've had it sent to a 3rd party repair, who have finished the reballing, and benchtesting, but I'm still waiting for it to arrive. which sucks because I have Lollipop Chainsaw and Dragon's Dogma sitting in my living room waitiing to be played. but, until that happens I don't have much to say. unless you want to hear about Minecraft. or Kerbal Space Program, or the always interesting Final Fantasy XIV*. hmm, maybe I do have stuff to post... *based on personal experience many patches after the original version. results may vary.