PS2: She Lives!

We have two PlayStation2s in this house. One came with me, one came with Makal. Mine's not worked for some time; first it stopped reading most PS2 discs, then stopped reading DVDs ('twas my player for a time). Makal's has always been a bit temperamental too. We'd have to hit it upside the head occasionally to get it working. Until recently, when it stopped reading certain discs, and became a bit more of a crap shot as to whether or not it would work. And that was fine, until it stopped reading Okami. Fuck that, we just bought the game on Black Friday. I wanted to play Okami damnit! So today I did what any logical girl would do: I took my PlayStation2 apart.

Yep, voided the warranty and took it apart. What good is a warranty that's out of date, anyway? I found a website discussing a bit of PS2 troubleshooting, mainly what could be the cause of the "Disc Read Error"s we've been getting. This site (a technical site which offered replacement parts and mail-in repairs) sited that usually such an error was caused by a dirty laser (naughty naughty ;) or a dirty laser gear. I cleaned both of em up with Q-tips (or whatever those are generically) and saline solution since we apparently have no rubbing alcohol. Plugged it back in and, yay, it lives! Okami booted up fine, though not on the first try. But still, this PS2 was the one we thought was pretty much gone, and it wasn't after all.

We'd been considering getting a new PS2--one of the $130 slimlines--but if we have one working console, maybe even two, we definitely don't need a new one. So if/when we get around to it, I'll take pictures of the open case and poke around. ;)