A couple months back my PS3 stopped working. It turns out I was a victim of the dreaded 'yellow light of death', or YLOD.
This occurs from poor cooling of the GPU chip, which eventually causes the chip to become unsoldered at certain points.
A quick Google search for PS3 YLOD uncovered dozens of fix videos on youtube. They entail taking apart the unit, and with a heat gun, reflowing the solder on the chip.
Initially this fix worked. The playstation played for a few hours, then died again :(
I had gone through the same process several times, each time the fix would last shorter and shorter.
Finally on a posting, someone mentioned removing the heat spreader plate from the GPU and replacing the dried up thermal compound between the chip and the spreader. The posting was prefaced by saying that there's a good chance you'll permanently damage the chip while trying to remove the heat spreader, but I had nothing to lose at this point.
Taking the heat gun, I heated the plate a little, and with a putty knife, popped off the heat plate.
I cleaned off all old thermal paste, reran the heat gun to reflow the chip again, and applied a new dab of Arctic Silver 5, (grain of rice sized dab), to the middle of the chip.
After putting back the heat plate and reassembly, everything was hooked back up. It's been in use for a couple weeks without flaw. My kid has been using it heavily w/ MW2,3, and GhostBusters.
So far, it's holding together longer than previous fixes. It really looks like it's fixed this time.
So, if you've tried the reflow and it's not working any more, you might wanna give this process a shot. It may or may not work, but it worked for me.
