Full disclosure: I’ve always been a Sony fanboy customer.  It probably started back when I was young and the only brand of electronics in our home was Sony. We had a Sony 27” TV from the time I was 3 up until I was about 17. Sony was built to last, built for the long haul and would be there with you like a good friend. That’s why I never purchased an N64 or Xbox growing up, it was all about the Sony PlayStation.

Things just aren’t like they used to be, as I’ve had quite the adventure with my PS3.

I was the recipient of the original PlayStation in January 1997 for my 12^th birthday, and it still works to this day. I bought the PlayStation 2 in February 2004, and it still works to this day. I purchased the PlayStation 3 in March 2008, with the full expectation that it would work until the PlayStation Cuatro, or whatever goofy name they come up with when the next generation of systems come out.

Boy was I ever wrong.

Most people have heard of the Red Ring of Death (RRoD) on the Xbox 360 system. It’s the error that occurs when the heat sink fails, and the system overheats. Basically, the system is kind of shot when this happens without taking it apart and repairing the heat sink. There are a few fixes out there that are able to repair the system without taking it apart; however, all of those are temporary.

Though not as widely known, the PlayStation 3 has a very similar error, known as the Yellow Light of Death (YLoD). You can imagine my surprise when my Playstation got the YLoD before my Xbox got the RRoD, a mere 2 years after I had purchased it.

Upon the initial anger of losing not only my gaming system, but my DVD and Blu-Ray player, I decided to bite the bullet and take it to a repair shop. $60 and a 90-day warranty later, I had a working PlayStation. Who knows what they had done, because a month later…I got the same error. Took it back a second time, and this time it lasted about three more months, until the dreaded YLoD returned.

I was sick of spending money on a system that continued to break. So I decided the best way to fix it was to take matters into my own hands. After spending an entire afternoon sifting through YouTube videos, I found one that seemed to be the strangest idea ever to fix a gaming system, and it involved a hair dryer. You can see the video here (careful of the sound, those who read this at work).  Take a towel, hair dryer, and a half hour, mix it all together and you get a repaired PlayStation, supposedly.

Well, it worked — for a while. I got about 3 weeks of use out of this fix until the system decided to take another dive (right as I was about to hit a hole in one on Tiger Woods 2012, no less. Seriously, the ball was rolling towards the hole about 3 feet from the cup when it just stopped…and I heard the horrid “beepbeepbeep” sound, followed by a black screen). After nearly throwing the controller through the wall, I had had enough of my 60GB PlayStation 3.

Even though Sony had disappointed me for the first time ever, I was locked in, as I have a library of games and it was my best method of having a Blu-Ray player. I purchased a new one just yesterday, a 160GB slim model, which supposedly had fixed the design flaw that causes the overheating.

Seems like the end of the story, right? But then I was surprised yet again to find out that included on the box of the new PlayStation were instructions on how to transfer your data from your old PlayStation to your new one. How presumptuous, Sony! It’s almost like you knew that my old PlayStation was going to break, so you provided this “solution” when I broke down and bought a new one.  Like a sucker, I used the hairdryer trick to get the old one turned on long enough to get Tiger Woods out of the disk drive and transfer the data. If anyone wants a PlayStation that can be repaired over and over, but will break every 3-4 weeks, email me. I GIVE YOU GOOD PRICE

This leads me to the whole point of my rambling: Why is it that things break so much more frequently now? Unless you dropped your original Nintendo off of a building David Letterman style, or threw it into a fire, chances are it still works.  This video (complete with classic music) shows how resilient the games were back then.

Whether it’s due to the complexity of the systems nowadays, or the cost-cutting measures to increase profits, electronics don’t last like they used to. It may be my problem, as I contributed to their business twice, purchasing two PlayStations, but I think the brand loyalty is gone.

In today’s electronics, if you purchase the first version of a new product, you’re most likely going to be throwing a controller through a wall after it breaks. Caveat emptor.