How to fix yellow light on PS3

Let’s cut right to the chase, you’ve landed on this article by googling or finding it via EzineArticles and for a reason: your indispensable PS3 is now staring back at you through that dreaded and now infamous yellow light of death. The question is how to fix yellow light on PS3 when you are not an electronics repair guru or home appliance engineer.

Some PS3 owners are lucky in that they have a PS3 exclusively for gaming, 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 media was through the connected PS3 Play TV Box.

I think my point here is that PS3s have become much more than just game consoles in many homes, although they may not compete with the family mascot (we know some of you fondly caress their graceful curves behind ), still has a huge impact on your daily entertainment lifestyle. A yellow light of death or ‘YLOD’ can seriously hamper your ability to unwind 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 might be downhill 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 online start as low as £100, so it’s not a cheap fix. Of course, the PS3 may still be under warranty, but unless you’ve given it a good beating, YLOD is usually an issue that plagues older models, which themselves are often out of warranty.

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

Most people, myself included, usually turn to YouTube, the go-to guide for just about anything these days. You will find many videos on YLOD, but obviously you have to choose carefully, because people will show you several methods and variations of the same method. Some of these will work just fine, but others could irreparably damage your PS3, which defeats the point of this endeavor in the first place, as you now have to shell out another £200 or more for a new PS3.

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

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

For example, as soon as I removed the hard drive’s protection panel, I was met with the dreaded blue screw. A screw with such a soft head, grinding it is a real option if you don’t have a suitable Philips screwdriver at the start. If you shred it, then your chances of ever removing it, which you need for a YLOD fix, have simply gone out the window. The fact that my blue screw was ridiculously tight didn’t help matters!

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

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

hard drive panel
hard drives
memory card readers
blu ray drive
bluetooth antenna
Power supply
fan and connector
Battery
hard drive bay
heat sink

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

Apply fresh 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 simply YouTube’s workaround and is not a guarantee of success or long term solution.

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

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

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

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