Second time lucky (more heat needed)!

Mijn probleem

Got the YLOD on my fat 60gb PS3 that I've had pretty much since they came out. Had no idea what to do or what caused it, but was a little disappointed as there was s till a disc stuck inside, and I had never saved any of my game data to the cloud. I was really hoping a kit / procedure like the ifixit one would help me.

Mijn oplossing

As you can tell from the title, it did work, but I ended up doing it twice. The first time I thought I had followed all the instructions, but once I had put it all back together it wouldn't even switch on let alone work properly. I took the covers off to check for loose connections and put it back together again, and in the process found that I now have to give the power and eject buttons a good press instead of just a light touch. However, this just got me back to having the YLOD.

So, feeling like I had nothing to lose, I did the whole procedure again, but this time I really gave it some when it came to the concentrated heat on the processors and surrounding chips - heat gun on high, around 2 - 3 inches from the surface of the board, in a circular motion for nearly two minutes. I thought I had nearly cooked the board. Once cooled down, I also used a slightly different technique for applying the thermal paste (as per the arctic silver website), but I guess I'll only find out whether that was effective or not over time. Anyway, all back together now and it worked. I had to set the date and time, and then it did an internal system check, and then I was back up and running. All data etc intact, just like before the YLOD first occurred.

Mijn advies

1. Make sure you've heated the board enough for the solder to re-flow, not having done this before I think I was a bit tentative the first time.

2. I used the 'surface spread' technique for applying the thermal paste, as per the instructions on the artic silver website. I'm sure there's nothing wrong with the way the ifixit site recommends, but it was a bit messy to do and the result wasn't as neat as the arctic silver method.