At the end of 2007, everyone still reeling from Five Hundred and Ninety-Nine U.S. dollars, I snagged the 60GB model refurbished for $299. It was pretty incredible, having all those card readers, 4 USB ports, PS2 backwards compatibility with decreased load times, and (at the time) Linux running all my favorite SNES games on my TV from one console. But, being a launch model, it was more susceptible to YLOD, and in FAll 2011 it bit the dust.

I sent mine in to a company called GopherMods who can fix it for $60-80 and I'm pretty sure they kept all my save files. Unfortunately, if you subject it to heavy play, it may inevitably happen again. At least, with my 60GB model, it was and it went again in January or so

I play mostly on PC now and the PS4 is coming out, so I'm not sure if I'm going to get another. If I have some disposable income, I might buy one of the official refurbs from Sony's ebay account, they have a pretty good price and I'd feel most comfortable grabbing one of those.