Your easiest fix ever ?

Bought a ton of N64 games dirt cheap when GameStop/EB Games were getting rid of them all to make room for the new consoles. One of the games I was purchasing was Pokemon Stadium 2, I was told as I was leaving they also had another copy but they were pretty sure it was broken. They said if I wanted it, I could have it. I figured why not, so I brought it home and popped it in. Guess what?!?!? It worked just fine and still does to this day!!!!

As a side note, when I was 8, I went to a local Arcade/Go-Kart/Mini-Golf place for my Birthday. As I was leaving, one of the employees ran up to me and said I left something in the prize machine. She then handed me TWO holographic 1st Edition Charizard Pokemon cards! I had not even tried the prize machine that day (even as a boy, I knew they were rigged!), before I could say anything to her other than my initial "WOW!, THANK YOU!" she was running off in another direction, not that I would have said anything that meant giving the cards back! Hehe!

 

Neo Geo AES was sold as not working, was using wrong power supply with it, works fine.

 

I still remember how many people wanted Blastoise and Charizard so bad. Those were the days...

 

Got a PS2 Slim free. They said light is red as soon as you turn it on the light goes out.

They had a PSP charger for the power supply

 

$15 PS3 Slim which wouldn't read discs, cleaned laser, worked perfectly. Lots of dust was in the drive for some reason. Good as new after cleaning it all out.

Nice idea for a thread BTW.

 

It must have been a train carriage that was dropped on it because I can't even imagine being able to do that to one of those.

 

Thanks. A year ago I also bought a PS3. It was a 60gb fat. The seller said it wouldn't boot to XMB. When I held the console, something was making a noise inside there. So I reseated the HDD and it booted up perfectly. Sold it for a very nice profit and bought myself a brand new PS3 Superslim, the 12 gb model.

 

Hmm, I think the easiest would either be my 2600 that was missing the RF cord (the one it had was sheared off inside, luckily it's actually a pretty easy fix, just any big pin (like Composite/Component, but I don't know the name) cable will fit, I just needed a 90 degree adapter so it didn't hit the plastic, or the Wii I got that had a dislodged Bluetooth module and wouldn't turn on. Plugged it back in, and it works like a charm.

 

It was a massive dent, just seems like a paint can dropped on it. Surprisingly I sold it though

 

Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game arcade board was given to me as faulty - no graphics or sound.

I changed the jumper settings to those found in the manual, and presto - back to full working condition

 

My girlfriend's PS3 stopped working, so I took it apart and found that the DVD drive had been caved in slightly. Wasn't very difficult to fix... just needed to be straightened out.

Also took apart a broken PS2 controller once. I couldn't find any problems, so I admitted defeat and just put it back together. For some reason, it worked just fine after doing so.

 

Non working PS2 Slim, DVD drive issue, initially thought it was going to be a laser swap out, but it turned out they must have dropped something heavy on it which pushed the laser into the ribbon cable below and cut into it. One new ribbon cable later and it was perfect!

26" LCD tv not working, no power whatsoever, owner had no idea why it wouldn't work. Was all prepared to strip it down but turned out it had a separate power switch tucked away on the back of the tv, turned it back on and all was fine - technically not a fix though.

 

A PS2 Slim that didn't want to power on...
After some fiddling and cleaning on the PSU, it was working normally, but it had some strange problems on the menu and with some games.

I noticed that a wire was loose on the internal modchip, so I got the wired it back into it's place, and now the console is working flawlessly!

 

My easiest fixes were:

1.PS1 SCPH-5552 bought for $1.95 (7 RON). The CD drive didn't spin but a tweak of the CD pot fixed it. Also had a modchip.

2.PSone SCPH-102 - PM41A board - this one was $1.40 (5 RON). Did something wrong (my fault) and it wouldn't power up but laser was emitting the red light. Fixed by first bridging 3 fuses and then applying rosin over them. It works fine now,and I fitted a 4-wire Old Crow chip to it

3.PS2 SCPH-39003 - GH-018 board - same as the PSOne,it wouldn't show any sign of life,so I did the same treatment - remove fuse,bridge points together,apply rosin over them - done. It works like a charm now,and it's my PS2's mainboard. Also changed the black case with a silver one.

PS: Some of you might say bridging fuses on a console motherboard isn't good - have you tried applying rosin over the bridged fuse? It isolates it and prevents any short with metal.

 

Bought a lot of 3 "broken" gen2/3 pokemon games super cheap (less than 10$). One needed a new battery, one had some rust/corrosion on the contacts and the final one I have gotten it running but it won't save but I'm not giving up yet. I'll figure that one out too.

 

My brothers 3DS XL kept switching itself off. Noticed it happened every time you twist it slightly. Took back cover off and reseated battery. No joy, same thing happens. Put a thin piece of card between the battery and back cover, and hey presto. Fixed.

 

My current laptop, with docking station, that I use as my desktop, was headed for e-waste, as it did nothing, wouldn't turn on, nothing!

Didn't matter if it was plugged into the mains or not, the battery didn't charge, it was completely dead...

Well, it seems that if I removed and replaced the battery, it then worked perfectly..

Apparently, if the battery was removed, it worked perfectly, but if the battery was in place but not connected properly (dirty contact maybe?) the laptop wouldn't allow it to do anything!

 

Not so much a "fix", but I got $10 knocked off a $30 Xbox because I said the DVD drive wasn't opening. It's one of the Samsungs that you have to tap the top of the lid for. I don't know the actual fix and didn't care too much either; I just had someone do a softmod on a 200GB drive since my hard drive controller was too new to be detected by xboxhdm. Still works to this day and is my go-to Xbox when I feel like playing something.

 

Loose AES board bought as faulty from auctions site (was bought for a project). I was expecting it to be sucky to fix but lol it was just a broken trace near the slot connector:

 

My easiest fix was on a Japanese Saturn. A friend that I trade games with had picked up a couple non-working ones up while overseas. One that wouldn't do anything turned out to have a mod chip installed and when I took it out, it worked fine. I did a little case swapping and now have a nice working Japanese Saturn.