A Tragic Day...(UPDATED)

(Getty)
I live in New York City, and unless you live under a rock, you probably know that it's really expensive here. I have lots of bills to pay: rent, utilities, cable/Internet, groceries, medical bills, credit card payments, etc. I often fantasize about waking up at Noon, playing video games or blogging or making funny films all day until it's time to go to bed, and just magically having money to pay for stuff. Unfortunately, I live in a reality and a very harsh reality a lot of the time. In reality I have to go to work. I work a fairly typical 9-5-type job in an office. I have a little bit of freedom at my desk (I have time to blog and surf the web in between real work needing to get done) and I can drink all the free (pretty decent) coffee my heart desires, I have health insurance and I don't have to stress out about money 24/7. Overall, not a terrible gig, but not my dream job. My point is, I'm thankful for employment, but at the end of the day or on the weekends, I don't want to be bothered, I just want to go home, sit in my under-roos and play video games until my head hurts. I'm a simple gal.

Friday night I went to bed fairly early because I was tired from a long and unnecessarily stressful week at work. My boyfriend stayed up and watched Doctor Who streaming on the PS3. When I woke up the next morning all refreshed and thinking about gaming to day away, I hear a strange beep-beep-beep and my boyfriend saying "Oh fuck!" in the living room. He then admitted that while watching The Doctor, the PS3 turned itself off. He figured it had just overheated and left it alone. But when he touched the power button, the power light turned green for a couple of seconds, then yellow/red/orange, beeped 3 times and turned off again. My heart broke; first Steve Jobs, now this?! (And I swear to you, since Steve Jobs died, my 3 month-old iPod has been acting funny...but I digress.) We had never seen this "Yellow Light of Death" before.

Swiftly, my boyfriend turned to our trusty friend Google. We clicked link after link and watched video after crappy video of "solutions" to this problem. Our warranty was well past expired and we sure didn't want to fork over $150 for Sony to diagnose and maybe fix it.

We finally came across a video from iFixIt. The video was well-made with step by step instructions on taking apart the PS3 and re-soddering a broken connection, which is the most common cause of the "Yellow Light of Death." We did some more investigation to make sure they were legit. They had mostly positive reviews, and the little kit they sold was only $40 and included all the materials you would need to fix your PS3. We ordered it, and hopefully we can get our PS3 up and running again soon.

Now, you might be asking, "Why not just buy a new one?" Well, aside from the whole I-live-in-NYC-and-everything-is-expensive-here-and-I-don't-have-the-money-to-blow-on-a-new-console-right-now thing, we have a very special PS3 that Sony no longer makes. We have the 80GB that is backwards-compatible with PS2 games. So if we got a new PS3, we would also need to hunt down a PS2 if we ever wanted to play any of our older games again. And that's a lot of $cratch we just don't have right now, especially since the holiday season is almost upon us and I need to save up for gift-giving.

If there is a silver lining to this story, it's that I did get to play video games this weekend. We not only have a PS3, but we also have our older consoles, including a Sega Genesis, SNES, NES, GameCube, and an Xbox360 that my boyfriend's co-worker just gave to us. I'd been meaning to start playing Xbox more regularly, but we hadn't gotten around to getting any games for it other than the NBA Live 2010 or whatever disk was left in there from the previous owner, and as I mentioned before, I don't really play sports games. However, another friend of ours loaned us his copy of Fable III which I've been wanting to play for some time. I started playing and am really enjoying it. So, yes, there is a bright side to the story: I got to play a new game (even though I still prefer PS to XBox) and there is still hope that the PS3 may live to game once again.

So, stay tuned, I will talk more about my pros/cons of PS3 Vs. XBox, how I'm enjoying Fable III, and let you know the outcome of my PS3 YLOD drama (also whether or not iFixit came through for us).

Update: The kit came in the mail in a timely fashion, we were at NYCC when the mailman brought it, so we had to pick it up at the post office, but it got to us as stated! Boyfriend went into "tinkering mode" and spent the better part of a day fixing the PlayStation as instructed by iFixit. He's going to end up replacing the fan inside the PS3 as well to ensure that this doesn't happen again in the near future, but otherwise, so far it seems to be all fixed for a fraction of what Sony would have charged us! *knock on wood*