Monday, April 23, 2007

The PS/3 Blues

Wednesday last week, just prior to the Rangers completing their sweep of Atlanta in the first round of the NHL playoffs, I powered on my PS/3 to check whether wireless was working (my laptop wasn't able to get an IP address at that time). When I did so, I noticed that the colours were all wrong (there was too much of a purple and green tint to everything), the audio had a deep hummmm to it, and there was a wavy line travelling up the screen continually, causing distortion. After spending a few minutes trying simple stuff - power off and on, check the cables - I gave up so that I could focus on the hockey game. My assumption at the time was that the $50 HD cables I'd bought in early January had gone kablooey and that I'd be looking at replacing them.

Today, on my day off, I did some deeper investigation. I switched from HD to SD, and used my PS/2 cables in place of the HD component cables I'd been using. Right away I could tell the problem wasn't with the cables, as the same situation existed with the PS/2 cables. So now I'm lead to believe the issue's with the PS/3 itself. It's almost unusable in this condition, as the graphics are fairly distorted, and the audio hummmm is quite annoying. (Having said that, I did manage to finish the single person version of Resistance: Fall of Man today.) The good news is that PS/3's come with a 1-year warranty, according to the Sony site I visited. So this may mean I'll be trading it in for a new one, which I imagine means I'll lose all of my R:FoM online progress (including my promotions thru the ranks), since it's tied to a particular box MAC address. I guess that's not so big a deal, though, as long as the problem gets dealt with.

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