admin Posted on 5:18 am

How to fix yellow light on PS3

Let’s get straight to the point, you’ve come to this article either by Googling or finding it through EzineArticles and for a reason – your essential PS3 is now staring you through that dreaded, now infamous yellow light of death. The question is how to fix the yellow light on PS3 when you are not an electronics repair guru or an appliance engineer.

Some PS3 owners are lucky in the sense that they have a purely gaming PS3, so if it fails, they still have a dedicated blu-ray player to use as a backup for non-gaming activities. If you’re not so lucky, then a faulty PS3 also prevents you from watching movies, documentaries, or even recording TV if your only recording medium was through the connected PS3 Play TV Box.

I think what I mean here is that PS3s have become much more than just game consoles in many households, although they may not compete with the family pet (although we know that some of you lovingly caress their graceful curves. rear view), it still has a huge impact on your daily entertainment lifestyle. A yellow light of death or ‘YLOD’ can seriously hamper your ability to relax after a long day.

Then what do you do?

You have three options.

1. You can buy a new PS3 which is expensive, but if your existing PS3 is getting old it could be on a downhill slope and catch more bugs even if you fix the yellow light of death.

2. You can send it to Sony for repair, but the figures I’ve seen written down online start from £ 100 so it’s not a cheap solution. Of course, the PS3 may still be under warranty, but unless you’ve taken a serious hit, the YLOD is generally an issue that affects older models, which are themselves generally out of warranty.

3. The cheapest option in theory: the DIY YLOD solution. This is where you can watch YouTube videos, follow forum posts, or buy / subscribe to a product online that shows you the steps to fix them. Obviously, the risk with step three is that you do the work yourself and if you are not trained in electronics, you should be very careful with the tips that follow.

Most people, myself included, usually turn to YouTube, the go-to guide for just about anything today. You will find a lot of videos on YLOD, but obviously you have to choose carefully, because people will show various methods and variations of the same method. Some of these will work fine, but others could irreparably damage your PS3, defeating the goal of this effort in the first place, as you now have to shell out another £ 200 + for a new PS3.

After doing some research on this topic, the common cause of yellow light on PS3 is separation of the CPU and / or GPU from the motherboard. To fix YLOD on PS3, you need to follow some simple steps. The steps themselves are easy enough, but they are also fraught with dangers if you get them wrong.

I swapped out the hard drive on my own PS3, because I wanted more storage capacity, and even though I’m a trained electrician who uses screwdrivers every day, I could see how some steps can seem daunting to the uninitiated.

For example, as soon as I removed the hard drive blanket panel, I came across the dreaded blue screw. A screw with such a smooth head, that crushing it is a real option if you don’t have the correct Philips screwdriver at first. If you destroy it, your chances of ever removing it, which you need for a YLOD repair, just fly out the window. The fact that my blue screw was ridiculously tight didn’t help at all!

Another tip worth mentioning is where you do the YLOD repair. You may have noticed that computer components generally come wrapped in sealed plastic bags, this is to protect sensitive electronic circuits from static electricity. Similarly, you should perform this task in a clean, well-lit, and dust-free area, preferably on a static-free plastic sheet.

With the power off, to disassemble the PS3 in stages, remove the following parts keeping in mind the removal of screws and ribbon cables in order:

Hard drive panel
HDD
Memory card readers
Blu-ray drive
Bluetooth antenna
Power supply
Fan and connector
Drums
Hard drive bay
Heat dissipator

When you have the bare motherboard in front of you, the next step is to clean the chemical compound from the back of the CPU / GPU and then apply a heat gun for about five minutes to warm them up.

Apply new thermal grease and after letting the board cool for fifteen minutes reassemble the PS3 and this should solve the problem for a while, but this method is purely YouTube’s workaround and is no guarantee of success or long term solution.

Personally, I don’t recommend the YouTube method to most people, except for those with some skills in dismantling electronic equipment. The first option is probably the best if you’ve had the existing PS3 for a long time, but then again, do you really want to buy a new PS3 with the rumored PS4 around the corner?

The cost of shipping it to a licensed PS3 engineer is quite prohibitive when you consider how much a new console costs, so option three, using a trusted online resource, seems to have the most benefit as long as the cost amount is not. Too big.

After all, you are reading this article, because you probably have to make that decision urgently. If you wanted to know how to fix the yellow light on PS3, now you know the details and have the information to make the decision that you consider best.

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