Well. It’s been one heck of a week, up and down. My PS3 died on Tuesday night whilst Sarah was playing FFXIII. She hadn’t done anything unusual, just playing normally, but the PS3 suddenly locked up (which it has done on RARE occasions before), this time however when the PS3 was reset it was completely unable to read games, or DVDs or music. Sony wouldn’t repair this hardware fault as the device was out of warranty, however offered me a refurbished PS3 for £160!! The problem with that for me was that after reading a few forums this seems to be a common hardware fault for the first generation of PS3s (Sony claimed this wasn’t the case when I explained this to them over the phone, however if anyone from Sony reading this would like to google the topic there are more than 720,000 results) which worries me about spending £160 when in all likelyhood the device will break again in the moderately near future, and a repair comes with only 3 months warranty. :-S

I started looking around online to check out the prices of the new PS3 slim systems, coming in at around £270, however they come with 1 year warranty and the ability to buy extended warranty. The problem for this was finding £270 just laying around to get a new system, however I came across Argos offering the very new 250GB PS3 slim at £285 which if purchased with the Argos card would allow us to pay the cost over 6 months with 0% APR. So I went to get the PS3 from the nearest store to us with one in stock (and only one it turned out) in Bromsgrove (not that close by). Whilst at the store I also took out 4 years warranty on the console (which added about £50 more to the device) however after the recent breakdown I definately want the cover, plus with the warranty added on to the price the purchase now fell into the 9months with 0% APR category, which works out with us buying a new PS3 for about £20 per month each for the next few months, which is great! The old system still works with the internet at streaming media too, so its a really good media center system for the bedroom, its just a shame that it can’t play DVDs or games anymore, however if we have some spare coin laying around in the future it’s definately something we could have repaired to do those kind of tasks again.