I'm watching the credits of Final Fantasy 12 roll at the moment.

To get this far, I had to play the final boss rush several times in a row, turn the PS2 (a model 4 PS2 BTW) on its side, clean the disc, vacuum the system, and skip (by mashing X and start amidst constant stuttering) several cutscenes to get the bloody thing to go this far. Luckily the endgame bosses are complete pussies or I would've probably snapped the disc at some point.

As I intend to complete several other PS2 games in the near future, I'll probably have to deal with these hangups/crashes again at some point, and the tricks described above probably won't always work. Does anyone have any "war stories" to tell or fixes to share, so I won't have to start climbing walls the next time this happens? :P

I've had about 5 PS1's, and roughly 4 or 5 PS2's. It seems all of them just.... go out after about a year of use. I got so good at fixing PS1's I took apart about 5 broken ones to make one good Frankenstien PS1 that worked. Unfortunately, the connecting ribbon on the laser was alot shorter in later models, and would not reach the motherboard, so I couldn't set the laser where it needed to go to fit in the case. :(

I'm still on my first PS3 and my second 360, however.