A Penny for your Thoughts

Yesterday my wife and I decided to rearrange our living room. We wall mounted the TV again and did it right by running all of the cords through the wall and ceiling. But when I moved my PS3 I heard something inside of it and I have caught my 2 year old son sticking stuff, mainly change, in the CD loading slot before. Already the anxiety had set in. I was so upset I picked up the PS3 and started shaking the shit out of it to try and get whatever it was out; real smart huh?

I then proceeded to turn it on for some idiotic reason and it turned on but you then heard this load grinding gears noise since whatever was in there had managed to lodge itself in the gears which spin the disc. I just kept thinking to myself over and over again that there is no way I am going to get this fixed or get a new one if it is totally broke. Now I am sure by now that someone reading this is thinking that I should have called Sony by now and set up to get it serviced. Well I did, but I was still uncertain of doing that at the moment because honestly my pocketbook can’t afford a $150 repair.

Finally I am at a point of no other options but to call Sony. After explaining everything to them, they basically tell me to take the console and throw it away if it is not working. Why you ask; because if you send anything in to be repaired and there is a foreign object in the bluray drive they will not repair the console and simply return it to you unfixed, still containing whatever it is that might be lodged in there. What, are you kidding me! How is it that it would cost more to me as a consumer to go and buy a new console as opposed to having the bluray drive replaced if it is unfixable? Were they trying to tell me that the bluray drive itself costs more than the whole PS3 unit as a whole? I doubt it, but like every retailer out there they see it as an opportunity to make me as the consumer go out and spend another $350 on a new PS3 instead of spending maybe $150 on repairing the one I already own. It is nothing more than a scam of a marketing ploy.

At this point I had no option but to try and fix it myself. What could it hurt, because even if I totally screwed it up I wouldn’t be out anything right? After some research on the internet and thanks to YouTube I found some good videos about dismantling the PS3 and the bluray drive. The hardest part was finding the necessary torque bolt to remove the initial screw to take the casing off the PS3. From there it was a breeze and luckily for you guys I took pictures.

This first picture is what the unit looks like with the outer casing removed.

Next you have to remove 7 screws to remove the inner casing that holds the CPU and bluray drive in place.

Here you can see the CPU and the bluray drive on the right. The bluray drive is not screwed in, so you can pick it up and disconnect the ribbon wire from the underside to completely remove it from the console.

Once that is out you need to flip it over and there you can see the motherboard for the bluray drive.

The next step is to unscrew the six screws on the bottom of the drive to remove the motherboard and the casing for the optical drive of the bluray player. Also you need to unhook all of the ribbon wires from the motherboard itself to completely remove it.

Once the casing is off you are left with the optical drive itself. At this point you are only 4 screws away from opening it entirely.

Now that it is opened you can clean the lens or remove a 1962 penny from your bluray drive, which may cause the gears of the drive to jam, whichever suites you best.

From here you just work in reverse to put everything back together.
Now mind you I have no computer repair experience at all. This is the first time I have ever done something like this and if I must say it was pretty easy. As long as you can follow directions you should not have a problem if you were in a similar situation. All together it took me about 30 minutes from start to finish, and now my PS3 is in full working order again. Long story short, I have a working PS3 again and I saved myself the cost of a new system. Thanks Sony for being a bunch of greedy a-holes and forcing me into a position to fix it myself.

-Brian R.

Side Note: My son was nowhere near my PS3 yesterday. So I have no idea how long that penny had been sitting in the bluray drive before it finally dislodged and caused some damage. It is kind of funny if you ask me, but if I had to guess it had been in there for at least a week while I was watching movies and playing LittleBigPlanet.