cybercylon

Over the past month, my PS3 would consistently crash after about 45 minutes to 1 hr of play time. Since I was playing Skyrim, I thought that in itself was the issue. Other than that, I have pretty much used it for media files and watching Blu-ray movies. No problems there that I could tell.

So after giving up on Skyrim, I tried to give FF XIII-2 a whirl until the patch for Skyrim was out. Unfortunately, I have the same problem with FF XIII-2. Crash and boom. Sometimes it will reboot after ejecting the disc, or sometimes it will reboot into a screen full of green and black garbage. More often than not, I have to hold the power button down to turn it off. It will either start up again normally, the screen will be filled with green and black crap, or it will give me an error message explaining that it needs to check for errors on the HD. If that last one happens, it starts normally.

One other thing I've noticed... if I try to play a game again too soon, the crash may happen sooner.

It is a 40 gig fat model, though I replaced the drive about a year ago with a 250 gig one. My best guess is either the HD is going bad as it gets warm or there is a component that is going bad that causes a failure once the unit gets warm. My suspicion is on the last one since playing movies doesn't seem to stress it out too much. I've read that this could be caused by either a HD problem, a blu-ray drive problem, or a problem on the logic board.

I've tried reformatting the drive and installing from the backup (thank goodness I've been doing that!). I'm not sure what rebuilding the database does that slating the drive does not. Maybe I should try surrounding the unit with cool gel packs?

And no... the 1.4 patch did not fix the problem.

Any of you have any ideas or should I break out my tenor sax and start playing taps?

Sigh... in the same week, our router dies and my iPod bit the dust. Don't remember being mean to any old women recently.........

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Once again, the opportunity to pick up a 60 gig BC model is in front of me. If I were "Mr. Money Bags", I'd just get it, but that isn't the case. I have a 40 gig model that was made shortly before the slims came out. I replaced the HD drive a long time ago, and there wasn't much in the way that was worth transferring. Now I have a bunch of game saves and some PSN content that I would need to transfer over. What is involved? Someone once posted that they lost their game saves when trying to do the same thing. Is the process as simple with the 360 where you just slap your HD on a new model and transfer the licenses to any purchased content?

I'm not sure if I am going to go through with it if this is a pain. I still have a working PS2 (a launch model that still plays blue backs!), and I have long backlog of PS2 rpgs in my library. It would be nice to have one less console to deal with, and who knows how long a launch model will keep going.

I'm also concerned about the optical drive in an old PS3 like that. Do they last a long time? Is their truth to these models having a tendency to overheat?

Thanks in advance.

So a DVD player to one of our TVs bit the dust, and I've moved our Blu-ray player to replace it. So I've finally bit the bullet and picked up a PS3.

I'm aware of some of the bigger exclusives (picked up Valkyria Chronicles and MSG4 to get started). Any recommended hidden exclusive gems? I don't care for racing and fighting games, and the closest I get to first person shooters is something like Fallout.