Hey guys, I wanted to first of all thank you for all your help and suggestions.
I also wanted to let you know that, through a sort of Christmas miracle, the problem has been taken care of. A certain someone happened to read my original post here on Technibble about the PS3... he prefers to be a little discrete about it, so we'll just call him
Santa for now. Anyway,
Santa happens to head up a large organization that likes to reach out to techs in need whenever possible, and after reading my post and seeing the difficulty we were all having finding that part, decided that he couldn't in good conscious leave Christmas to chance. I don't know
Santa, nor have I ever actually talked to him before, but still he called me out of the blue Friday afternoon and introduced himself. He explained who he was, and went on to tell me that his organization would like to buy my kids a brand new PlayStation 3 for Christmas, and asked for my PayPal address! After a few minutes of shock, and realizing that it wasn't some kind of joke or scam, I gave him the info. Less than an hour later I received a notification from PayPal that I had received a payment of $350.00!
I'm very humbled by
Santa's gesture, and I can't begin to express my gratitude. With business being as slow as it has, the whole "Fix the Broken PS3" idea was really the only
great present I was going to be able to come up with this year (aside from random stocking stuffers and clothes,) and when I ran into problems locating that part, I thought for sure that I was screwed. Thanks to the generosity of
Santa and his organization, my kids will have a nice pile of presents to open and I can finally stop freaking out, lol! We picked up the new PS3 last night, and have enough left over to get them a nice starter collection of games from the local resale shop (does anyone actually pay full retail for games?? lol)
As for the broken PS3, I will still attempt to repair it just for the sake of knowing if it CAN be repaired. I talked to another repair shop in the area that does a high volume of console repairs, and their tech swears up and down that I can replace the BR drive with a different model
drive so long as the new drive is compatible
PS3 model number, which is the opposite of what I had read online. He says they've replaced dozens of them without any problem. So, I decided to go ahead and order the part that he said should be compatible and we'll see what happens. I'll post the results here just for information's sake. Worst case scenario is I'll have an oversized streaming player for the shop.
