Last week, after over three years of flawless service, my PS3 developed the heat cycle fault that has ended the life of many of the original versions of the console. Luckily it wasn’t immediately terminal, so I managed to get the save data copied off of it in the short time it would stay on before powering down due to system failure.
That done, I had two options; pay £75 to get it repaired “professionally” or attempt to do it myself. The former came with a three month guarantee, the latter came free but with a chance I could do more harm than good. I decided it would be hard to trust a repaired system anyway, as it could go down again at any time, so decided that I’d crack it open and try to extend the life of it long enough to do a system migration.