Your easiest fix ever ?

That's a fine way to get a Saturn.
Welcome to the forum.

 

I remember my easiest fix: bought in 2006 a "broken" PS2 fat for nearly nothing on ebay. Symptom: the console shuts down itself after 20mn. Received the console, opened it... and saw a broken blade on the fan which blocked it. Get an old 6cm fan I kept in spare (from a CPU heatsink, an Aqua 690 from Taisol), welded the connector from the PS2 fan.
Total amount of work: 2 wires weled, 15mn (spent most of the time at remove/replace the fans). The console was back to business, was chipped a few weeks later and resold with a nice profit ^^.

 

Nice. I got an original Xbox for 10$ with the same problem, I already had one that wouldn't turn on with a good drive so I swapped drives and trashed the junk drive.

I should've tried this first, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Og2sk4ZnSX0

 

About the only thing that would be solid and heavy enough to do that kind of damage to an Xbox would be another Xbox

 

Easiest fix? Got a new PowerBook G4 in 2001 that didn't boot because of stuck reset button. One drop of alcohol and everything is fine. Still works perfectly, can run for 50+ minutes on battery (yeah, 13 years old battery)

 

Nexus 7 advertised as dead, got it for about £15 fully boxed mint condition. When delivered it appeared dead not charging. However there was a faint flicker on the screen when plugged in. Left it on charge for 10 minutes and BOOM!! fired up and charged to 100%, was perfect!

 

Sega Genesis Model 2 VA 2.3 Magnificently designed board, way less hassle than the other models.

 

One time I got a set of decent quality Sony headphones for free because a very small piece of regulator plastic snapped inside the right side speaker casing.

I found a plastic bread tie, snapped it into smaller and smaller pieces until it was a reasonable size, cut it to match the dimensions of the piece of plastic from the working side of the headphones, cut out the remains of the snapped plastic from the broken side, made a slot, applied the piece I made with super glue, and applied pressure to keep it in place. It worked! It was done at least 4-5 years ago but the set still works!

 

-Bought a sega saturn, console only, listed as non-working. I acquired the appropriate cables for it, plugged it in and it worked fine.
-Had a non-working xbox 360 hdd. Opened the hdd up and manually moved the head off of the platter where it was stuck. It worked fine after that.
-Bought a japanese dreamcast listed as "disc won't spin"/broken. Opened it up and somehow the piece of plastic that would move the internal switch to indicate the disc lid was down (and to start spinning up the disc) was getting pushed so far down that it wasn't registering as being down. Filed away a bit of the plastic that would push that switch down, so it wouldn't be pushed down quite so much, and it worked fine.

In recent news, I bought a Lynx 2 listed as broken. It has not arrived yet, but it is my hope that the seller did not test it with a game plugged in - as the system does not turn on if there is no game in the slot.

 

Bought a HP Pavilion G6 2 years ago when they where the main laptop being sold in the UK. Advertised as overheating 3 months old. Well.... It came from one dirty MoFO.

I'm sure it was used as a masturbation station and the fan was clogged up with matted nasty stuff.

So I donned my surgical gloves, face mask, kitchen towel and 99% isoprop.

The thing was sparkling new after not a mark on it. must have been all the caked on nasty that protected it! Still had protective films on the surround and lid. I'm sure I got that for £80 delivered as well.

Easy job but totally nasty!!

 

Still gross dude. Even isoprop wouldn't be enough to erase the fact that you know its sordid history.

 

I bought a PS2 Test unit, listed as faulty disc tray, all it was the front of the tray had came off. bit of super glue as the clip had broken.

I've bought other ps2 units a faulty, described as not reading discs, I simply opened them up and cleaned the laser unit. Sorted!

 

I've fixed 2 Saturns by replacing the disc drive. Replacing the drive is really easy - you just set it in the correct place (you don't even have to screw anything in) attach a couple cables, and that's it. You have to have a donor drive, of course. The first time, I had a Japanese Saturn that had difficulty reading discs. I happened to have a spare American Saturn, which happened to have the correct drive - so I installed the new drive and it worked. I've been using the Saturn in its repaired state for several years now, and it still works great. Recently I had an American Saturn that had difficulty reading discs, so I bought a drive from a member here, installed it, and it works great now. This will of course cost some money if you don't already have a spare drive, but it's still less than buying a full system - which is ideal if you have a system that's perfectly functional except for the drive. Anyway, the topic was about "easiest fix(es)", and replacing the Saturn drive is incredibly easy. I should mention that I've only done this with model 1 systems - I'm not sure what it's like with a model 2.

 

This is a good tip for anyone with this problem.. on the Nintendo Wii system, sometimes the Controller and the pointy hand on the screen 'detach' or stop working together. There is a bluetooth chip inside the Wii, which apparently gets overheated and 'slides out of place.'

I had the thought to turn off the Wii.. and give it a good shaking with out dismantling. Have had this happen 3x, and each time has worked flawlessly... No dis-assembly required!

 

Picked up a sony laptop quite a few years back very cheap because it intermittently wouldnt charge and the owner had been told it was a faulty motherboard - new power jack and 30 minutes later, still works to date and made a great Christmas present at the time!

 

The lynx came today, and after putting batteries in, and a game cartridge in, the system powered up fine and appeared fully functional. Another easy "fix" for me

 

Bought a "faulty" 3ds turns out the charging port was damaged. With parts cost me £7.99.

 

320gb ps3
Wouldn't boot (black screen)

pulled hdd, formatted it and deleted the partition table, popped it back in, working (had to reinstall fw obviously haha)

 

got a cheap RM Tablet for £9 because it wouldnt charge (back when tablets where x86 celerons ) seller provided a 12v psu but the rating on the back was 19v , simple psu swap and it was charging fine

just a shame the battery lasts less than 10 mins though ...

 

That HDD is bad, have it replaced. It will do that again.

Edit:

Explanation:

Once the PS3 hit the area with the bad block during normal operation (it does write stuff all the time through the disk including on firmware areas) it will get stuck again and will stop on the black screen. That happens because it keeps trying and it has a very long timeout (5 minutes).

Most people don't have enough patience to wait it time out and come up with the error message about the hard drive being bad.