Fixed! Nintendo Wii Game freezes frequently at specific location

This can be the most frustrating problem for us when we are playing games on our Nintendo Wii. That being said, occasional lockups with video games can happen from time-to-time and do not necessarily indicate a need for repair or replacement of your Nintendo Wii gaming system. If you are experiencing frequent lockups, or a particular game always locks up in the same area, please see the information below – as it could be a larger problem..

Most importantly, please make sure you are using only licensed accessories. Unlicensed products and accessories do not undergo Nintendo's testing and evaluation process. They may not work at all with our game systems, and they may have compatibility problems with certain games or accessories. This could be the cause of erratic or unexpected behaviors, including game lockups.

This post is one of several on how to fix problems with your Nintendo Wii. To see the entire list, click here for the Nintendo Wii Repair Guide.

If a game freezes while playing, usually power, reset, and eject buttons will not respond to the problem. Try unplugging the AC Adapter from the back of the console, then check the air vents to make sure they're not being blocked, causing the erratic behavior.

If you are still experiencing this issue, what to do will depend on how many games this issue is occurring with. How many games are you having this issue with "freezing"?

If this happens with just one particular game
1. Check out Nintento's list of specific games to see if there is a known issue with that particular title.

2. Check the bottom of the Game Disc (the side without any labels or writing) for any dirt or damage (such as cracks, scratches, etc.).

o If the game looks significantly damaged, such as with scratches or cracks, it will need to be replaced. Please click here for Nintendo's Game Disc replacement options.
o If the game looks dirty (fingerprints, smudges), try cleaning the Game Disc by using my cleaning guide by clicking here. If the problem persists, the Game Disc will need to be replaced. Please click here for Nintendo's Game Disc replacement options.

If after trying the above information you are still experiencing lockups with and you only have one only game disc, please click here for game disc replacement information.


* If more than one game experiences freeze at specific locations during game-play:
1. Try cleaning a few of the game discs using our recommended method and re-test to see if the situation has improved.

If after trying the above information you are still experiencing lockups with multiple games, please call 1-800-255-3700 for assistance.

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How To: Clean Nintendo Wii Game Disc

Is your Wii game disc or DVD not playing correctly?

Has the game disc been sitting out for an extended period of time collecting dust?

Is it freezing or experiencing other erratic behavior?

If the answer to the any of the above is yes, then this is the post for you where you will be walked through Nintendo's official game clean instructions.

Fingerprints, smudges, and other foreign material can interfere with a game disc being properly read by the Wii console. Please use the information on this page to properly clean a dirty Game Disc.

Before getting started, it is recommended that you get the Nintendo Wii Lens Cleaning kit. It's only $9.99, and you get get it from Amazon.com by clicking here to help keep your Nintendo Wii lens free of dirt and debris.

This post is one of several on how to fix problems with your Nintendo Wii. To see the entire list, click here for the Nintendo Wii Repair Guide.

With the cleaning kit, it makes the process much easier and we are ready to get started. As an important note, please remember:

* Use only: straight strokes when wiping the disc (do not use a circular motion).
* Use only: a clean, soft, cotton cloth (do not use paper towels, facial tissue, etc.).
* Use only: water (do not use soap or any other cleaning solution).

* Do NOT use: solvents such as: benzine, window cleaner, paint thinner, anti-static aerosol spray or abrasive cleaners.
* Do NOT use: machines designed to clean discs or remove scratches. These types of devices could damage the surface of the disc.

Here's how you can properly cleaning a game disc:

1. Dampen a portion of a clean, soft, cotton cloth, using only plain water lightly. Do not over saturate or soak the cloth.

2. With the damp part of the cloth, use straight strokes and wipe the bottom of the disc (non-labeled side) from the inside rim to the outside rim. Do not wipe in circular motion. Please see image below for proper cleaning technique.



3. Using a dry part of the cloth, use straight strokes and wipe from the inside rim to the outside rim. Repeat if necessary.

4. After all of the water has been removed, let the disc sit for at least two minutes to completely dry before inserting it into the Wii console. Do not use a hairdryer, heatgun, or any other heating device to accelerate the drying.

5. Try to play the game to see if the problem has been resolved.

If the problem has been resolved, be sure to properly take care of your game discs by storing them in their plastic cases in order to help prevent your discs from becoming dirty or scratched. Storing games in cases other than the ones they came in, or storing them outside their cases, may damage the disc. Do not leave them sitting out for extended periods of time.

If the same problem continues, the cause is likely damage to the disc. Use the disc replacement policy to determine how to get your game replaced.

If the game never worked or you are discovering errors in areas you have entered for the first time, it is possible that the problem could be with the system or the disc. (The system may still be the problem even if the disc shows some signs of damage.) Please call 1-800-255-3700 to discuss possible repair options.

As I mentioned earlier, if you are occasionally experiencing disc read errors, you may want to consider purchasing the Wii Lens Cleaner. Using the licensed Wii Lens Cleaner can help keep your Wii's lens clean from foreign material, which may help prevent these errors from worsening over time. For more information on this product, click here.

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How To: Enter Diagnostics Mode on Sony Playstation 3 (PS3)

There's a secret way to get your Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) into a diagnostic mode that will enable you to try some advanced "fixing" options for your game console. With the recent failure of my Blu-Ray disc drive, I figured it was worth a try.

In order to enter the diagnostic mode on your PS3, perform the following:

Hold Power button down for three beeps (while PS3 is off): Enter PS3 diagnostic mode.

However, this can be a little tricky. Generally, you do not count the first beep when the system turns on, so it is three after that. What happened on my PS3 is that the first time it beeped three times, the Sony Playstation 3 console shut itself off. On the second try, the second and third beeps come very close together. Take your finger off the button and you enter the diagnostic mode. They key here is the two quick beeps.

Once you enter the main menu for the PS3 Diagnostics, you have the following options:
Restart System
Restore Default Settings
Restore File System
Rebuild Database
Restore PS3 System
System Update

Two of the options are only available through this menu, Restore File System and Rebuild Database. All of the others can be completed through your normal Sony Playstation 3 menus.

Here is how both of them work:

Restore File System
After entering this mode, you are prompted with the question, Are you sure you want to restore the file system. You select yes and press down the X button.

The system restarts and then you get this message:

The hard disk's file systemis corrupted and will be restored.

It took about 45 seconds for my file system to be rebuilt. After it was restored / rebuilt, the PS3 restarts itself automatically.

Rebuild Database
Here, you are prompted with the question:

Are you sure you want to rebuild the database on the hard disk?

If you rebuild the database, messages, playlists and other saved information will be deleted.

It may take a few hours to rebuild the database.

After choosing yes, the system reboot's then you get the message:

The hard disk's database will be rebuilt.

In my case, it took less than 30 seconds and then the Sony Playstation rebooted itself automatically.

Unfortunately in my case none of these diagnostic utilities fixed the problem with my Blu-Ray disc drive...which means I will still need to send it in for service. Hopefully, you'll find these tips and options helpful!

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How To: Force disc to eject from Sony Playstation 3 (PS3)

Will you Blu-Ray, DVD, or game discs not eject from your Playstation 3?

Do you press the eject button, but nothing happens?

Perhaps there was a power outage and now your disks will not eject?

In any case, there is a Sony Playstation secret that will enable you to force the ejection and and removal of the Blu-Ray, DVD, or game disc from your PS3.

How does it work?

While your Sony Playstation 3 is still on, rather than just pressing the eject button, instead hold the eject button down for 8 seconds. This will override and force the disc to eject!

Good luck, hopefully that works for you!

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How To: Reset Video Settings on Sony Playstation 3 (PS3)

I had an interesting problem that I needed to solve. With my primary Sony Playstation 3 being broken (learn more here), I wanted to move my PS3 from upstairs down to the main home theater so I could still watch movies and playing games.

I thought it would be really easy. Just unplug the Playstation 3 upstairs, bring it downstairs and plug it in. Everything would work, no problems. I brought it down, plugged it in and guess what? No video or sound.

Why?

The Sony Playstation 3 does not have an "automatic" detect when you change the type of video connection. In my case, my Vizio LCD HDTV upstairs used an HDMI connection and my Sony Projection HDTV downstairs still used the component / d-terminal video and optical audio output. So, I could not get any video or audio.

I tried first changing the settings upstairs while connected to the HDMI to the component output, but I could not get it to save. Seemingly, Sony's PS3 was trying to protect me from myself by not allowing me to configure an unsupported video mode. If only they knew what I was trying to accomplished.

Was I stuck?

After some searching, I found a technique that your can use in order to reset the video (and audio in my case) settings on your PS3. Presumably it resets all of the "connections" on your PS3.

Here's how you perform the video / audio format and settings reset:

With your Playstation 3 turned off, do the following: Hold power button down for two beeps and then release. This function will reset video and audio to auto-detect and lowest settings.

I tried this out and it worked great for me...my PS3 was working with both audio and video immediately. The good news is that you can use this for any video and audio modes you are changing between including HDMI, Component, D-Terminal, Composite, S-Video, AV MULTI, and SCART.

Good luck, let me know with a comment if this technique works for you!

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How To: Attach USB Hard Drive to your Playstation 3 (PS3)

You think that in this day and age it would be drop dead simple to attach a hard drive to your Sony Playstation 3. In fact, it is 2009 and it's almost been 15 years since Microsoft gave us Windows 95 with it's plug-and-play -- which some called plug-and-pray. You would think, wouldn't you?

But it is not that simple, at all. In fact, your PS3 is very restrictive on the type of USB hard drive or mass storage device that you can attach to your Sony Playstation 3. Why? Your PS3 only allows for a mass storage device like a hard drive to be recognized in the FAT32 format.

FAT32 you say? Microsoft introduced FAT32 with Windows 95/98 (Wikipedia article on FAT here) and Windows 2008 server, Windows 7 and Windows Vista do not support it via their disk utility or disk management systems. Only NTFS and a new version of FAT called exFAT which is also known as FAT64. But, you guessed it...exFAT / FAT64 is not recognized by the Sony Playstation 3 System.

Which, leaves us in a little bit of a quandary. With only Mac OS X system Snow Leopard which will allow a FAT file system and a Microsoft Windows Vista system that will only format in exFAT, what is a person to do? All we want to do is connect an external hard drive to the PS3!

One of the most natural thoughts is...why don't you just go to a MS-DOS prompt and enter "format x: /FS:FAT32" where "x:" is the drive you want to format? Well, if your hard drive is bigger than 32GB -- which most are today -- you're in trouble as that command line will only generate a 32GB drive. (Of course, make sure you're running as administrator with windows elevated permissions)

What are you options?

Well, through this page I found a link (click here) to a program called "fat32format" which is a command line utility that enables you to format the entire partition, even those larger than 32GB as a FAT32 partition.

Here's how you should go about it:

1. Format your hard drive -- in my case it was a 80GB portable drive I have -- in either NTFS or exFAT, using the entire partition.

2. Download the fat32format1.zip file to enable formatting of hard drives and media over 32GB with FAT32 on Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7. Unzip it in a location you know.

3. Open up a command line prompt as administrator with elevated permissions (you can do this by right-click and selecting run as administrator).

4. Browse to the folder where the fat32format.exe file is located.

5. Type "fat32format.exe z:" where z: is the letter of the drive you want to format as FAT32 larger than 32GB.

6. Type "Y" to confirm the drive and format. Now your drive will format!

Once it has completed, you will have a hard drive as large as the original partition you created with the FAT32 format on it. In my case, I had ~75GB available for data storage -- plenty of space to backup my Sony Playstation 3 (PS3) system.

I was able to connect it and it was immediately recognized without issue.

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Fixed? PS3 Won't Read or Play DVDs, Games, or Blu-Ray Discs

The day has come unfortuantely; where it appears the original Sony Playstation 3 (PS3) that I bought 3 years ago at launch needs to have some work done on it. I am not sure exactly how it happened, but it appears that a combination of the Blu-Ray laser and/or mechanism failed.

This apparently was fairly common with some of the early versions of the Sony PS3, especially my CECHA-01 model; basically the very first hardware / firmware release of the Playstation 3. Some of the articles and discussion (this one for example) suggest that this was due to either poor quality Blu-Ray lasers being installed, or some overclocking by Sony early on to get the hardware fast enough to keep up with the demands.

In any case, I see several people with yearly failures of their PS3 Blu-Ray laser and replacements and varying symptoms from not reading just Blu-Ray discs to reading nothing: no games, no standard DVDs, no Blu-Ray.

My PS3 appears to have the symptom that none of them work. The Blu-Ray DVDs, Games, and standard DVDs load and spin up fine. However, there does not appear to be any tracking or reading happening. The end result is that nothing shows up in the main screen of the PS3 Operating System and load screen when turning the PS3 on.

Initially, I was unwilling to accept that my Playstation 3 was dead. I tried a number of old tricks and techniques to see if it was a cleaning or other basic issue. Here are the things I tried:

1. Good old can of air and basic cleaning of the PS3. No luck.

2. I tried the Playstation "cleaning" secret where the PS3 power switch in the off position, you turn power switch back on while holding down Eject button for 6-10 seconds. This mode allows you to clean out the dust inside the PS3. However, this technique only works for Models CECHG and higher. Bummer.

3. I tried resetting my PS3; both a soft reset as well as restoring the default factory settings. If you end up doing this process, please make sure you backup your PS3 system and settings first!

So, after numerous testing and investigation of alternatives...I have oddly opted to send it back to Sony for $150 to have it repaired. This was rather unusual for me to opt for this choice, but after a full investigation -- I decided it was the best option for me.

Why?

After some research, I found that you can get a laser lens and replacement deck from Amazon.com or eBay for about $50-$90, depending on the vendor and the amount of risk you want to take -- for example, a refurbished Blu-Ray lens / deck might be had for $50. Still, given the surprisingly high failure rate on the lasers -- did not seem worthwhile to me. At least you get a 90-day warranty from SCEA (Sony) on any repaired Playstation 3's. It seemed there was a lot of risk to take for $60 of savings; given a high likelihood that I could end up not only with a still broken PS3, but a $90 investment that I would still need to spend an additional $150 to complete the fix. Easy choice in my book where the risk of failure outweighed the cost savings.

However, if these Blu-Ray laser lens replacement approach $30 -- it would definitely be a different story!

Still if you are up for the do-it-yourself, you can get your replacement laser lens / deck from Amazon.com just by clicking here.

Here's a picture of what it looks like:



In addition, I found two great videos that will walk you through how you can accomplish the repair and replacement of the PS3 laser lens and deck on YouTube.

Part I: The tear-down guide for your Playstation 3:



Part II: The removal and replacement of the Blu-Ray laser and laser deck:



If you choose to attempt to repair the laser lens deck or the Blu-Ray laser itself, I am sure you'll be successful given the two videos above.

In the end, this type of problem is a little disappointing for my PS3 --, I had the same thing happen with my early edition Playstation 2 (PS2) where the CD-ROM failed and I needed to spend way too much money to have it fixed and replaced. At this point, I am willing to bite the bullet for $150 to have the Blu-Ray drive and laser fixed with Sony...but if the prices on the Blu-Ray DVD players keep coming down at the rate they have been to under $100. If it happens again, one of my two PS3's will be slated for parts and retirement.

Crazy how this always seems to happen with the game consoles, but I have yet to have a DVD Player itself ever fail on me. It sort of makes me wonder why.

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How To: Blackberry Pearl 8100 LCD Replacement Guide

You put your Blackberry Pearl into your pants pocket and you bumped into something and you heard crack...causing your to squirm.

Or...maybe you Blackberry Pearl was dropped and the face hit a sharp corner of a rock, breaking the LCD.

Or...perhaps you just got made and hit your Blackberry Pearl and you shattered the LCD.

Or...maybe it just burnt out or stopped working.

In any case, if you are out of sorts because you need to replace the LCD screen on your Blackberry Pearl 8100 series, then this is the right post for you! In just a couple of steps, I will show you how you can quickly and easily you can repair the Blackberry yourself for free...in just a few minutes of your time!

Before we get started, there are two things that you need:

1. A replacement OEM LCD screen for your Blackberry Pearl! Thank goodness they are readily available, you can get yours from Amazon.com. Buy a replacement LCD by clicking here.

2. You need a Torx bit screwdriver, specifically of the T6 size. However, I have found that is always best to have a complete set. Again, you can purchase these from Amazon and here is a quick link for you, click here to purchase.

If you have those two items, then you are ready to go. Just as a quick reminder, this particular guide should cover the entire line of Blackberry phones whether you are on the AT&T / Cingular, T-Mobile, or Verizon networks. As each network has it's own Blackberry Pearl model including the Blackberry Pearl 8100, Blackberry Pearl 8110, Blackberry Pearl 8120, and Blackberry Pearl 8130.

Now, let's get started with how to tutorial:

1. First off, you need to perform a basic tear down of your Blackberry Pearl 8100 series smart phone mobile device. I have previously posted a how-to guide on the basic technique for disassembling the Blackberry Pearl here: http://www.somelifeblog.com/2009/10/blackberry-pearl-8100-tear-down-guide.html

2. Once you get the basic tear down completed leaving you with the Blackberry Pearl main board with the LCD screen attached, now you will need to unhook the LCD cable from the board so you can remove the LCD. To do this, there is a small latch in the uppoer left hand corner (upper right of the picture) of the Blackberry LCD FACING the LCD Screen. Lift the black latch with light pressure to unlock the cable -- be careful not to damage the latch or the cable, as recovery is very difficult.


3. Now slide out the cable from the connector and you will notice that the LCD Screen sticks to the main board. Just lift with even pressure in order to remove the LCD screen. It should peel off, just like a sticker!



4. To replace your screen, just follow the two steps above in reverse. You want to position the the LCD Screen first and stick it to the main board on your Blackberry Pearl before you re-attach the LCD cable connector. Be sure to latch down the cable before putting your Blackberry Pearl back together or you will be going through the tear down process again!

Good luck, please let me know if this works for you with a comment; or feel free to leave a question!

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