Playstation 3 Technical Issues

The Playstation 3 console has been reported to have a number of technical errors. The most common are reported here.

Yellow Light of Death
The Yellow Light of Death, named after the so-called Red Ring of Death for the Xbox 360, occurs when there has been a general component failure and renders the PS3 unuseable, showing merely a yellow light on the disk drive LED.

The yellow light, usually followed by a flashing red light, is an unspecific indicator of one or more of the components inside the console becoming faulty. Since it covers numerous possibilities of what the fault may be, what the problem is exactly cannot be determined by the yellow light alone.

PS3 Freezing
This problem occurs when the user plays a game or a Blu-ray movie with the latest update installed on the PS3 and at some point it freezes. Pressing the PS button often does not help - to be fixed, the user must hold the power button to reset it or resolve to switch the back switch off/on. Many who encounter this get this same problem over and over again. Often trying to play Blu-Ray after this will result in error 80010514.

Since the Leap Year glitch, known as ApocalyPS3, there has been an increase of this problem, among others. It could be a corrupted software caused by Sony's 'Online' Updates that kills the Blu-ray lens.

Some help can be found here. "The firmware update that was intended to decrease Blu-ray Disc read times by speeding up the motor and spindle, is causing an increased power draw," says the writer on this site. "This is fine for the newer systems made with 60nm [nanometer] and 45nm chipsets that use less power and therefore create less heat. But for the older, original 90nm chips, that already ran towards the hot side to begin with, it's fatal. Too much power draw creates too much heat and leads to overheating and failure. It's blatantly obvious to anyone who has worked with computers and laptops."

Some people get it fixed by deleting the game data utility or restoring the system files. This may or may not work.

Additional help: here.