Let's Play "Figure Out What's Wrong With Hambone's PS3!"

:(

I should come here more often; I really do mean to.

Anyway, last night I was watching Buffy (Netflix) on my PS3 (old, the one released in 2007 - the MotorStorm pack, so it has full backwards compatibility). On the home menu, Old Faithful simply turned off. Or, rather, it didn't turn off exactly. The green light stayed on (along with the blue one; there was a DVD in there) but it sounded as if the fan lost a significant amount of power. All I can say is that my PS3 made a whole bunch less than it normally does. In addition to all of that, there was no picture/sound, and when I pressed the PS button on the controller, it gave no response. When I manually turned it off, it turned off mostly normally, but the green light blinked a little more than it usually does when turning off.

I called SCEA, went through their bs customer support stuff with a representative (i.e., the "unplug all your stuff" and "turn these things on/off" and "press the power button until you hear the three beeps,") and she was like, "meow, it looks like you're gonna have to send it in for repair, and since the warranty ended two years ago, it's gonna cost $130...plus shipping."

It's not the repair I have a problem with (because, well, I'm not paying for it) and we're not getting it repaired by Sony because that'd take ages, and there's another place I'm pretty confident that can do it...and for less.

What I'm wondering, though, is this: what the heck is up with my system? I've never had any issues with it before. Is it a power supply issue?

Older PS3 models often suffered from a problem often reffered to as "YLOD" (Yellow Light of Death). Although you didn't talk about yellow light (only green and blue), it might be what just happend to your PS3. This problem is caused by extreme overheating of older PS3 models, which leads to the melting of PS3's processor soldering.

The fix for this usually involves careful removal of all the solder from the processor and PS3 mainboard and resoldering the processor back to the mainboard. This requires special equipment as well as skilful hands.