Late Night News Flash = PS3

The £14.99 PS3 from ebay...Lives, I take all the credit for this, its taken two strip downs, soldering, heat gun, thermal paste, luck, a new Hard drive and the latest firmware update...

But she works...

Had her on the big plasma down stairs just now, signed up to the PSN, went through some pages and things.

Sooo... I just put a few quid bid on an old game or two... Next to see if the other machine can live... Now I have an idea how to fix 'em....

If the other lives, I'm going to have to make a profit and sell it on...

Track IR for WarThunder, Bargain PS3 and WarThunder Ground Combat!

Right, so I played IL2 and Forgotten battles loads, I even had an X52 throttle and joystick and a TrakIR4 head tracker...

I've just started to pack my current lab/office up to move, and I found the head tracker and I know where the joy stick set it...

It maybe time to hit "full real battle" on War Thunder...

In other news, I got the first PS3 from t'internet... this one was £14.99... Reportedly its broken... Well, After fiddling with the little wire from the Blueray deck, and resetting it to Factory mode - reflashing - and then starting up again, it seems to be fine.

Then there was coverage out over the weekend (from Gaijin, but reposted in English by Jingles) of the ground combat in WarThunder...

Okay, the physics look dodgy... and the integration with air combat had me a little nervous, but boy did it look gorgeous, and Gaijin already make WarThunder in flight mode look spectacular!

PS3 Strip

So, the PS3's are here.  One is powering on but just black screen, I reckon its either a broken Blue-Ray or a bust HDD.  The other, three beeps and red flashing light.

So, I started with the £14 machine, this is a 60GB version, with the lift up flap expansion ports available, and it just powers on and sits there, having entered recovery mode it reports it can't access the HDD inside, so I swapped the HDD with the other machine, no dice.

I plan to test the drives for both and strip out an old HDD I have in a 2.5" caddy to replace into that one machine and give it another whirl.

Anyway, I set that machine a side.

Now, I'm sorry for no pictures here, I really need to get a camera in here, or sort something out because I used to take pictures all the time - check out my silent fan review and fitting series!

Anyway, I set that machine aside and set about the other... This was the first one I bid on, because it sounded like it needs the classic reseat of the CPU & GPU and new thermal paste job.  I stripped the machine down, and there was lots of dust inside, many dust bunnies and even a spider had made a home in one end.

This machine was a cheaper model.  A 60GB one to be precise without the front panel connectors.

With it stripped down I cleaned everything up, I've actually run out of isopropyl alcohol doing this... now the thermal paste inside was crusted to hell, it was just lumps all out the side of the chips and over the top of the CPU it was just an oily film with patchy coverage - so I'm pretty happy that this may just be the problem, and I need to reset everything.

I have cleaned it up, and put my order for some decent thermal paste in.

I'll get some more iso back from the father-in-law tomorrow and finish cleaning her up and then get the heat going on her.

The Great £21 PS3 Risk

I'm not usually a risk taker, and I don't normally buy second hand kit, much preferring a known starting point the manual and all the cables which come with a new bought item...

So its totally out of character for me to have invested the heady sum of £21 on a PS3 console, which is in the Yellow LED of Death (YLOD) state.

My plan is to strip it open, clean it up and see if the GPU needs reballing, reflowing & reseating, or whether it just needs the old refresh of the thermal compound on the chipset.

It could be anything else, the worst case is the re-balling, which I'd not like to do by hand, but with some time, lots of alcohol and plenty of patience I maybe able to clean it up and resurrect it.

Car Body Repair Review - Steve Haskard - Eastwood - Nottinghamshire

I had to have my car repaired, just body work, and we went to a small local place and I can't highly recommend the place enough, you'll save a packet regular dealer prices, things work fast and they're nice chaps.  They're a small back street repair shop basically:

Steve Haskard

12A King Street

Eastwood

Nottingham

NG16 3DA

Phone: 01773 765 172

There's a bit of info here: http://www.carbodyshops.co.uk/city-Nottingham/1517495-repair-Steve-Haskard.html

They're just off the main drag at Eastwood, turn down "King Street" next to the Wellington pub and they're on the right.  Get a quote, get booked in, and you're golden.

They work fast too, sourcing, replacing, colour matching and refitting a whole door and side of my car, took just under two days, it would take over a week with other outlets I checked with!

Give 'em a try if you need body work, or paint work, in the east of Nottingham west of Derbyshire.

Windows Reinstall Time

My main PC at home has been a bit of a patched up pig of a machine for a while, it is a very old install of Vista Ultimate 64bit, it had the broken power supply for like seven months and only recently was fixed and brought back into use.  Its a fabulously specced machine, but I'm getting lots of little niggly problems with it.

Not least is a horrible stammering network lag.  Streaming video, playing games, anything with persistent network usage results in horrible lag.  At first I had thought it was just the wireless, but that signal is stable, and the other machines in the house is rock solid streaming.

So it comes down to Windows Reinstall time, now, luckily I do now have a spare Windows 7 64bit Professional license to use and so can install Windows 7 in place of vista, for gaming.

This leaves me with the decision of which base linux distro to go with?... I was thinking maybe its time to go for a highly tuned Arch, but really I want a pretty generic and stable release which I can pick up and run with coding C++ and OpenGL for a project I have coming up.  And Arch, as configurable and customisable as it is, is not a platform which is "off the shelf", far from it...

I'll have to think on about this, Mint might be the solution, certainly Ubuntu is no longer in my favour.