Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Fixing a PS2

My (I mean, Son's) PlayStation 2 stopped working awhile back. Broke my (I mean, his) heart. I checked the obvious things: it was plugged in, the light went from red to green when I pushed the power button (it's a newer slim-case model). But the browser thingy would come up, rather than the game in the console.

I poked a bit more, and after being unplugged and plugged back in, the laser would shuffle out and back when the unit was turned on, but still no life. I left the case open when doing this, (holding back the disc brake), and saw that the disc wasn't spinning up. Not a budge.

So I went poking around on eBay, looking to see what parts were available. After a bit of research, I found that the model I have is a V12, and that you can buy replacement drive motors. In my case, I went to www.richspsxparts.com to get mine, then ... drum roll, please ...

Ripped off the warranty sticker and popped open the case!

Woo hoo! I feel like a real man! I voided my warranty! (Yeah, never mind that it expired several months ago, and the machine was broken anyway.) Someone once said that if you can't open the case, then it's not yours. Well, buddy, it's mine now!

Anyway, all this self-congratulation aside, I had actually opened the case and poked around a bit before ordering the drive motor, but after getting the motor, four screws loosened the drive assembly, three more loosened the drive motor, a ribbon cable popped out of a socket to take the drive out, put the new one in, screws back in, and voila! It works again.

The motor was less than $20, so I figured that if that wasn't the problem, I wasn't out too much, (versus $130 for a new PS2, anyway), and it was good fun playing around inside the box.

And even more fun being able to play our games again.

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