Well, i made this section a few weeks ago but i just didn't ever put anything on it. Until now. First i would like to thank the community for their valuable feedback on the ViStart 7 release. I have already started working on the next build to try to address the bugs mentioned on the ViStart bugs board. I will be releasing that around Christmas hopefully. Anyway yesterday my brother came to me, he was quite depressed because his Playstation3 decided to YLOD (Yellow Light of Death). I did some research and it was what i had suspected. The YLOD is pretty much the equivalent of the Xbox360's RROD. "General Hardware Fault". 80% of the time for PS3's, this is apparently caused by cold solder joints between CPU/GPU and motherboard. The Japanese Launch Units had a slightly different design than the more recent units. Sony quickly changed their design in a desperate attempt to fix YLOD or potential YLOD units.
What's more amusing is how Sony are dealing with this problem.
The failure rate of PS3 is 0.5 %, (which is less than the accepted failure rate for electrical goods), compared to the 360 which was around the 30% mark. That number is substantially less now but still much higher than that of the PS3 and the accepted failure rate for electrical goods.
BBC Watchdog apparently launched their own investigation on the matter. Which invoked this amusing response from Sony
“We entirely refute the suggestion that PS3 consoles have an inherent defect or other design issue which is akin to any warranty issue experienced by another console manufacturer. “From the correspondence to date, I have serious concerns as to the accuracy of these allegations and the likely tone of the Watchdog report. The information that you have provided suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of the technical issues and a mis-characterisation of SCE UK’s OOW repairs policy.
Is my brother one of the 0.5% people affected (remember, these figures are calculated by Sony and obviously cannot be trusted. Just like Microsoft's fake figures of the RROD failures). Well maybe he is that unlucky. Anyway a few years ago a Japanese guy told me about what he called the "sony timer" theory. Apparently it's well known. Although it could just be small minority of people who have been very unlucky with Sony products. Although i am sure it would be more than 0.5%
(since it's a well known theory). He proposed that Sony intentionally engineer defects in their products which causes the product to fail just short of the warranty period. The only problem with that theory is that we know Sony sell PS3's at a loss. So i looked at how much a PS3 would be to get repaired officially, apparently it's around the £130 mark for YLOD. Although the BBC Watchdog crew made it look like it should be a £5 job. From i could tell in the video. They simply disassembled the units and reflowed. (The same effects could be achieved with a heat gun) So i did what they did only i used a heat gun instead. It worked great. If anyone decides to copy me (Which i take no responsibility for) then i recommend using a temperature controlled heat gun set on the lowest blow-speed and around 350 C. You should probably follow a guide. gilksy1 does a good guide. You can watch his youtube video here;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U70SgRDVcBoHappy un-LYOD-ing
