Uraeus on 11 December 2009
I bought a PS3 at launch myself, what I have done and which I sincerely believe will prolong its life is open it up and clean out the heatsink and fan with compressed air. There was quite a bit of dust that had built up for me and the machine is noticeably more silent again once I opened and cleaned it. A good tutorial for how to disassemble the PS3 here:
http://www.llamma.com/PS3/repair/PS3_disassembly_tutorial.htm
Also I suggest stopping the disassembly once you can get to the heatsink and fan unless you feel comfortable applying new thermal paste.
