OK, this isnt a computer problem. Its a PS3 problem. Still, I hope someone can help!

Ever since Ive had it the fans been extremely noisy. Is there any way to help, or if not, how much would a repair be?

A possible easy fix is to simply get the unit raised up on something that allows better air flow to the base (which is where the intakes are located).

Something like a wire baking rack would be ideal. Improved air flow should mean the fans do not have to work as hard.

ETA- Reminds me of working at the university and having to warn students about not using their laptop PCs on the bed- at least not for long periods of time. Blankets block air flow = overheating.

Of course- college students getting overheated in bed is a different sort of issue- but we did not deal with that.

This post has been edited by treydog: Jul 30 2011, 10:25 PM

Does the loud sound persist? My Xbox sounds like a freaking jet barreling down the runway when I turn it on, but after a few minutes it quiets down a lot.

That's a job for the health department.

This post has been edited by King Coin: Jul 30 2011, 10:57 PM

Yes. It definately persists. It starts off silent, but after a minute it gets a bit louder. then louder still. After 5 minutes its at jet engine stage. Also, it happens faster when playing a game (that might be my imagination). Ive heard that it could be the "Themal paste" whatever that is.

No, Im not a tech pro at all.

Thermal paste is the magic compound that allows for ideal heat transfer between a hardware component and a heat sink (for which the fans are providing airflow for). If it was applied incorrectly or insufficiently, then the transfer of heat between hardware components and the heat sink (which diffuses the heat and keeps your hardware cool) may not be ideal, and as such the fans are going to be working overtime to try and make up for it. Bad quality paste, or paste that has worn out, can also be to blame.

This post has been edited by Thomas Kaira: Jul 31 2011, 03:22 AM

Trey, I'm afraid the "elevated with nothing beneath" idea didnt help much. It just made it take longer to overheat.

I guess this means a call to sony for a repair job then...

How many other PS3s have you come across. All the ones I have have been pretty loud, might be nothing wrong with it. Or it could be dust (depending on how much you hoover), that certainly lowers heatsinks' ability to do their job.

As for repair, all I can imagine they'd do is clean it and maybe replace the fans or thermal paste if one or other is known to go. You could try an external cooling unit if such things exist for PS3s, no idea what they do to the warrenty though.

Oh boy. Tomorrow I'll be using my "mini sucker" to hoover up all the dust inside it. :/

Also, one of my mates has the same model and its whispering quiet.

Also also, I think I did see an external fan for sale in argos. There go my skyrim savings so I guess its Back to Part time jobbing

This is the stupidest idea I've ever thought of, but it just might work.

What if I were to put an everyday offic fan behind my PS3? Would that help at all?

I doubt it. The fans used in electronics are to draw hot air out; that means they have to channel that heat and pull it out through the vents. My XBox has one of those external fan thingies on it - it sits right on the external vents at the back and literally suck the heat out of the box. Makes it good for about an hour longer before the thing overheats.

All I can see the office fan doing is waft air around the PS3; it won't directly affect air flow through the machine. Sorry.

So in the spirit of

Quis custodiet custodes? (Spelling?)

Went into work Monday and my computer would not boot. Since I am the tech- thus the question above. Or to put it another way- "Who fixes the computer tech's busted computer?"

Now I could have simply done a re-image- I have the disks for that. But I also have files I would rather not lose--- and- true to form, my last backup was several months ago... Hey- I just GIVE the advice- I don't listen to it.

Anyway- the hard drive tested fine- so I got a handy dandy hard drive to USB adapter today and am currently saving off all my files. (The work computer is a laptop- otherwise I would have simply pulled the drive and put into another machine as a secondary.)

And of course- I now have a backup- which I will probably not update until the computer croaks again...

C4.

Actually, that's a semi serious response. If its a laptop, hardware problems usually mean time for a new one.

Believe me- I would be THRILLED to get a replacement. I already put a new mainboard in this thing last year.

But- it is a government agency computer- AND my users are limping along with 7-year-old PCS... so, prospects for replacement are dim.

In the last 4-5 times I've gotten on the game, one or more of my saves seems to be corrupted - lights flashing around (exactly like Fallout 3 did in places when it first came out). I've deleted that save, but it is wittling down my number of back-up saves lately since it is happening with more frequency. What would cause this suddenly? It never happened before in Oblivion.

My old nVidia card finally kicked the bucket almost a year ago, and I ended up replacing it with a Radeon 5670 with 1GB of onboard memory.

When I got FO3 up and running again, at full 1280x1024 resolution as opposed to 800x600, all textures maxed out... well, that was the first of many eyegasms, lemme tell ya!

Cue jealousy on my part! I've only got a home laptop and a work laptop (which is a) something I would rather not install games on even if there's nobody stopping me and a Mac) and the home laptop does not... do graphics very well.

In fact, I seem to have overheating problems myself - the fan *really* works overtime, and also the computer crashes if I do anything too CPU-strenuous. Like try to play Dragon Age (*sob*). I assume it's because of overheating because I can hear the fan working very hard, and also there's no error message, the computer just turns itself off, and it happens both under Ubuntu and Vista (I have a dual-boot). Keep meaning to call in the warranty that still lasts another two months to have a look at that. But even without there's massive lag for graphics-intensive things - I've been tempted to get a proper computer that can at least handle modded-up Morrowind, but the laptop isn't even three years old yet and I am not made of money.

...although actually the main thing that's been annoying me lately is that for no explicable reason my Mac's decided to switch my keyboard language to German whenever I open Word. I learned to type on a US keyboard, but I keep an alternate German one when I want to type something in German and need the ä, ö, ü and ß. The problem is that when it switches without telling me it means that I start typing and the next line looks like: zou see, thereäs actuallz manz differences between the twoö the z and y are verz obvious, but none of the punctuation is where zouäd expect either )with one or two exceptions=. Can zou guess how annozing this can get if zouäre used to touchßtzping and donät realiye whatäs happened for a while_

*thwaps it*

This post has been edited by Kazaera: Sep 5 2011, 11:38 AM

Kazaera, if your Mac is an Intel Mac Pro, you can run Windows & Morrowind and yes, 'Blivion on it. That's what I've done with my Mac. I have a second internal hard drive installed with Win7 and 'Blivion on it. I boot up into Win7 whenever I want to do my schoolwork or play TES. Since I did this in April, it's been running great, and 'Blivion looks great with my nVIDIA 8600 graphics card.

As for the keyboard issue, it sounds like your System Preferences got a little twisted around. I'm assuming you're running Snow Leopard? Go into your System Preferences and select Language & Text. On the first tab, Language, make sure English is at the top. If Deutsch is at the top, that may be why your keyboard keeps switching into German on you. Also, look at your modifier keys. If you're touch-typing, it's easy to hit control or option instead of shift, and command instead of the period or x. Believe me, I do that all the time. It's possible that you are hitting one of the modifier keys at the bottom of the keyboard at the same time you're hitting another key, and that's causing the keyboard to switch to German if you have it set to switch on a certain combination of keys. Clear as mud? PM me if you need more help - I'll try to help you out with that as much as I can. As for the laptop overheating issue, better call to have that looked at before the warranty runs out. If your laptop is anything like the MacBook Pros, you'll need to have the motherboard swapped out, and that can easily cost as much as a new laptop. That's the reason I've pretty much stopped using my MacBook Pro. I'm saving up for one of the new MacBook Airs, but it'll be a few years!

I also am having some laptop heating issues. It's all the rage nowadays it seem.s

The fan sounds relatively fine to me at the moment, but what tipped me off was my audio crackling after a while. I ran some tests and found out i'm running an internal temperature of around 50 degrees, sometimes kicking up to 60. Which is obviously not good.

So i'm off to try and find some compressed air to blast any dust in the fan with, but my question is could I just blast the fan through the outlet, to dislodge any dust, so it'd be extracted next time the fan starts running. Or should I open the laptop up and void the warranty to get at the fan a bit better?

In order to thoroughly clear out any dust within your laptop, you'd have to open it up. Sorry.

Thanks! And my Mac's a MacBook, so I don't know if that will work? *knows sooo little about computers* Also, although nobody cares if we have non-work stuff on our work computers (officemate of mine has WoW on hers, the general attitude is "they're PhD students, they can structure their time themselves) I sort of want to try not to get used to doing too much non-work stuff on it... although I suppose that's more or less hopeless by now anyway. >> It's worth a shot, because it's very hard to play stuff on my home laptop - because of the crashing issue and the graphics issue and the space issue (when I set up the dual-boot I allocated most of the hard drive space to Ubuntu, which means I have... some space problems playing games under Windows.)

Re: keyboard, I found something under System Preferences (System Preferences > International > Language) that had language preferences set, but that actually had English on top and German too far down. I also can't see how it could be the shortcut because it's every time I switch to Word (which I do by mouse, generally!) and literally /only/ when I switch to Word. I keep looking to see if Word has some weird default-language option but I can't find anything. I guess I could just install OpenOffice (would be useful anyway because I use it on my home comp and Word can't do .odt files last I checked) and see if that helps. Or someone's suggested just getting rid of the German keyboard because there are handy shortcuts for umlauts and esszett with Mac, but that's a bit frustrating and I'm worried that because I've also got a Chinese keyboard installed (I did Mandarin last year and wanted to be able to type up vocabulary) it'll then start switching to *that* instead.