FIAB: Fix it Again, Bava

A couple of months ago I wrote a throw away post about fixing the loud fan issue with our PS4. It worked, the living room was once again inhabitable during game play, and I was feeling inordinately accomplished. Turns out one of Miles’s friends happened to be there when I fixed it, and I guess word got out I can fix Ps4s. Another friend of Miles has a PS4 that has not worked for months, and Miles came home with it in hand one day in mid January hoping I could look at it. Well, I’m definitely no Tim Owens, but I could not resist the opportunity to shine as a parent—something that rarely happens for me. So, given I am a one-trick pony, I tried the same thing I did on my PS4, namely getting some canned air and blowing out the fan, regardless of the fact the issue was entirely different than a loud fan (I did mention I was no  Tim Owens and a 0ne-trick pony, right?). Even worse, while opening up this PS4, which was the Slim model versus the bulkier one I had, I voided the warranty when I did not have to. So, not only did I fail to fix the issue, but I ensured that an actual professional would not touch it 🙂 

So at this point I actually had to fix it, but soon after I made this mess I was on the road to the US for several weeks. Father of the year! The PS4 would turn on and initially load the PS4 icon, after that it would crash before getting to the dashboard. From what I could interpolate between the PS4 support forums and YouTube videos this is an issue with a bad hard drive. Luckily for my guarantee-voiding ass Sony makes the hard drives dead simple to swap-out with any basic 2.5″ laptop hard drive. I had nothing on hand, but I ordered a $40 Toshiba 2.5″ hard drive with 1TB of space and it finally arrived yesterday. I tried the swap last night and it worked perfectly. The PS4 finally booted up as expected, and the only casualty was the player data on the corrupted drive. It was cool that it worked, and maybe for a few days my dad stock will be higher than usual 🙂 

Oh yeah, also of note to no one is that I replaced the charging port and battery on one of the PS4 controllers last month. It was another fun little PS4 project that I took on after learning a controller would cost me upward of $60 to replace. So, I tried a $10 fix of swapping out the charging port first which was shot, but the battery still did not re-charge, so the next step was replacing the battery in the controller for $15 and that did the trick. It still cost me $25, but I saved a controller from the logic of disposable tech I have internalized and also learned how to take a controller apart and fix some basics as part of the deal—so it’s a win all around.