I don’t have good luck with PS3s.  It’s surprising, because that generation was known for Xbox 360s exploding and PS3s were considered to be fairly stable, but I’ve had the drives go out in both a 60GB launch model and a 120GB slim model.

I’m not even THAT heavy of a gamer.

Anyway.  So, back in 2012 I had two unusable PS3s, and I elected to replace the BD-ROM drive in the 60GB model and leave the slim as the system for playing downloaded games only… which means that I’ve been putting a lot of miles on the 60GB and not so many on the slim and I’m starting to worry about whether the 60GB will survive for long enough to finish up the PS3 backlog.  It has been crashing a LOT, which made finishing up Mortal Kombat’s story mode a pain in the arse because I would get a victory, the system would try to load a cutscene and crash, and the game wouldn’t have saved the victory so I’d have to fight it all over again.

So, I ordered a replacement drive unit off Amazon from a company called Nextec Direct, and it arrived just as I got sucked back into MMOs.  So, it’s been sitting in its mailing envelope for nearly three months now, until I decided that I really needed to get the dang thing installed.

I’ve never taken apart a Slim PS3 before, so I was looking for how-to videos online and getting rather flustered by the number of model variants Sony made.  It’s always a little nervewracking getting up to your elbows in a new piece of electronics.

Then, I figured I would take the new drive out of its box and look at it to see if that helped me decide how to go about things, and I was impressed by the fact that Nextec had included a T8 torx driver, and then I noticed a slip of paper UNDER the drive that had a URL for install instructions, and going to that took me through a very simple “what are you doing / what did you buy from us” wizard, and that got me to an almost ridiculously-competent video which walked me through the exact model of PS3 and pointed out all the bits where there were hidden screws and fragile cables and at the end of it I had a fully-functional slim PS3 again.

So, I get a nice sense of self-sufficiency for fixing something, and now I need to get cracking on that backlog again.