WTF.

I was just playing Magic: Planeswalkers earlier this evening; not a GPU or CPU intensive title, and mid-way through a round, "click" and blinking red light.

Okay. Not the first time I've seen this happen, having had my first YLoD in Q4 of 2008 with a 60GB SKU that was just under 2 years old. It was a high mileage console so not entirely suprising. Eventually sent that one in for a refurb 60GB unit after buying a 40GB MGS4 LE to replace it. It became my primary PS3 as of November 2008.

My brother in law buys a 40GB SKU in December 2007, YLoD, spring 2010. Lot of dust in that one. Fixed it long enough to salvage the data and eventually sent that one in for a refurb. A 120GB slim unit was purchased to replace it.

With the 40GB MGS4 LE SKU dying a little after two years of service, I'm starting to notice a pattern; they all died around the two year mark.

So that's three PS3 YLoDs out of 4 units, the last of which is a slim unit less than a year old. Definitely not the standard.

The mobo is currently cooling after a console tear down and CPU/GPU reflow so I can recover my data. After that I'll set that one aside until I can do a PS3 to PS3 data transfer to keep everything intact, but I'm not buying a third PS3 until new units roughly cost the same as a refurb, or $199. Out of principle. I won't be sending in a third PS3 for another refurb.

With that said, time to reassemble this thing and get my data back.

Easy, I'm on my sixth PS!.  With my sixth I had to get Sony to deactivate all previous 5 as of course given they failed I couldn't deactivate them myself and when I got my sixth PS3 it wouldn't initially allow me to activate any of my content.

To be fair, I've since discovered their was an electrical fauly in the socket the PS3s were connected too which was causing the problem (not that I'll be sharing that with Sony as I used a lot of arguing/complaning to avoid ever paying for a refurb unit) and have fixed it so I'm sure number six will last longer.  But still, I'm officially on my sixth PS3.

You actually ran out of console validations for your PSN purchases; that's hilarious.

I'm not sure if SCE deactivated my original PS3 when I sent it in for a refurb, so I might be on my 4th validation for my content. It easily totals more than the current price of a $299 PS3 so it's good to know they'll do remote deactivations.

I'm curious to see if the 60GB refurb SCE sent me back in early 2009 dies before they drop the price of the PS3 again. I think I'll disassemble it and replace the TIM before that happens.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyGisPgNbwo

Seems only the Wii doesnt get a decent parody song.

Buy a PS3 and sell it when a newer model is released. Then, buy the newer model.

Rinse and repeat. Never had a YLOD (partly) because I buy a new ps3 every year/2 years.

To the Xbox guys out there: you should do the same.

They almost certainly haven't deactivated any that went in for refurb.  There's a choice to do so yourself in the menu so I'd do that before swapping your console for a new one if possible.  Otherwise you have to get their support to deactivate the others.  Didn't seem to be too much of an issue.  1 phone call then a couple of hours later an email saying they'd done it.

You should have seen my face when I booted up the sixth one, went to PSN to download a game I'd bought before and got a message saying I couldn't because I'd reached my max activation limit!