Yup

But it might not have been caused by a motherboard failure which is what the hair dryer trick fixes

Thing is, I've heard that the hair dryer trick rarely works. Something along the lines that it doesn't get hot enough to melt the solder on the cpu and gpu or something like that. I had to wrap my motherboard in aluminium foil with cutouts for the cpu and gpu, get a heat gun and put it over 500+ degrees fahrenheit and then do circular motions on the cpu and gpu for about 1-2mins. 

But yeah, there are other causes to YLOD such as power supply failure or blu-ray driver failure(?).

If you can get a new ps3 for 99$, go ahead. I had already voided my warranty so that was why I took a leap of faith to try and get my game saves back.

I opened my launch ps3 up that jumped off my dresser and took a nasty spill. Its not to hard to do but it might void your warranty if you have one. But like i said its not hard to do just dont rip out the blue strip that plugs into the disk tray then just put it back together and send it off.

Funny thing about mine is it broke the eject button and i couldnt get the disk out so i shelfed it for a while (i have 6 ps3s). I brought it out a month or so ago and pluged it all in just to see what would happen and it started up no problems other than the disk tray doesnt work.

Thats probably what Ill do but I think not performing some frankensteinish experiments on it first would be an insult to my ps3. 

Once you open up the ps3 though, I don't think Sony will take it (need comfirmation on that matter).

Yea it has a warranty seal on the flat non-vented side of the ps3.