Let us get straight to the point, you have arrived at this article either by searching through Google or finding it through EzineArticles and for one reason – your indispensable PS3 is now staring back at you through that dreaded, now infamous yellow light of death. The question is how to fix the yellow light on PS3 when you are not an electronics repair guru or appliance engineer.

Some PS3 owners are lucky in the sense that they have a PS3 purely for gaming purposes, so if it goes down they still have a dedicated blu-ray player to use as back up for non gaming activities. If you are not that lucky, then a faulty PS3 also prevents you watching movies, documentaries or even recording TV if your sole means of recording was via the PS3 Play TV Box connected.

I think the point I am making here is that PS3’s have become much more than mere gaming consoles in many households, while maybe not rivalling the family pet (we know some of you lovingly caress its sleek back curves though), it still has a massive impact on your everyday entertainment lifestyle. A Yellow light of death or ‘YLOD’ can seriously hamper your ability to unwind after a long day.

So what do you do?

You have three options.

1. You can buy a new PS3 which is costly, but if your existing PS3 is getting old, it might be on the downhill slope and pick up more errors even if you get the yellow light of death fixed.

2. You can send it away to Sony for repair, but the figures I have seen banded about online start from £100, so not a cheap solution. Of course the PS3 might still be in warranty, but unless you have given it some serious hammer, the YLOD is generally a problem affecting older models, which in turn are usually out of warranty.

3. The cheap option in theory – DIY YLOD fix. This is where you watch the YouTube videos, follow the forum postings or buy/subscribe to an online product that shows you the fix steps. Obviously the risk with step three is that you do the work yourself and if you are not trained in electronics, you need to be very careful which advice you follow.

Most people, myself included, usually turn to YouTube – the go-to guide for almost anything nowadays. You will find plenty of videos on YLOD, but you obviously have to pick carefully, because people will show various methods and variations of the same method. Some of these will work fine, but others could irreparably damage your PS3, which defeats the object of this endeavour in the first place, as you now have to fork out another £200+ for a new PS3.

After performing some research on this topic the common cause of the yellow light on PS3 is separation of the CPU and/or GPU from the motherboard. To fix YLOD on PS3 you need to follow some straightforward steps. The steps themselves are easy enough, but also fraught with dangers if you get them wrong.

I changed the hard drive over in my own PS3, because I wanted more capacity for storage and even though I am a trained electrician who uses screwdrivers everyday, I could see how some steps might seem daunting to the uninitiated.

For instance, as soon as I removed the hard drive protection panel I was faced with the dreaded blue screw. A screw with a head so soft, that shredding it is a real option if you do not have the correct Philips screwdriver at the start. If you do shred it then your chances of ever removing it, which you need to for a YLOD fix, have just flown out of the window. The fact that my blue screw was ridiculously tight did not help matters!

Another tip worth mentioning is where you do the YLOD repair. You may have noticed that computer components generally come wrapped in sealed plastic bags, this is to protect the sensitive electronic circuitry from static electricity. Likewise, you should really perform this task in a dust free, well-lit, clean area, preferably on a static free plastic sheet.

With the power disconnected, to dismantle the PS3 in stages remove the parts below taking into account removing screws and ribbon cables in order:

Hard drive panel

Hard drive

Card memory readers

Blu-ray drive

Bluetooth antenna

Power supply

Fan and connector

Battery

Hard drive bay

Heat sink

When you have the naked motherboard before you the next step is to clean off the chemical compound from the back of the CPU/GPU and then apply a heat gun for approximately five minutes to heat them up.

Apply new thermal grease and after letting the board cool for fifteen minutes you then reassemble the PS3 and this should solve the problem for a while, but this method is purely the YouTube workaround and is no guarantee of success or long-term fix.

I do not personally recommend the YouTube way to most people, except those with some skills in dismantling electronic equipment. The first option is probably best if you have had the existing PS3 for a long time, but then again do you really want to buy a brand new PS3 with the rumoured PS4 just around the corner?

The cost of sending it away to a licensed PS3 engineer is fairly prohibitive when you consider how much a new console costs, so option three using a trusted online resource appears to have the most benefit as long as the cost amount is not too great.

At the end of the day you are reading this article, because it is likely that you have to make that choice urgently. If you wanted to know how to fix the yellow light on PS3, you now know the details and have the information to make whichever choice you deem best.

Last year I wrote a blog stating that office buildings are obsolete, and this year I’m thinking the same conjecture might also apply to big box stores. I recently noticed a Yahoo post entitled, The Coming Collapse of Commercial Real Estate is Already Here, by Stacy Curtin. Stacy aptly notes that Best Buy and Target missed their expected earnings targets, and as of this writing, Wal-Mart has seen 6 consecutive quarters of negative same store sales. Further, this happened to Best Buy even though a key competitor, CircuitCity, had moved into bankruptcy. Though this has occurred in a tough economy, many of their online competitors have seen significantly better results.

Stacy’s article notes that more people are buying, they are just buying online. This seems true globally and anecdotally. About a year ago, I tried to purchase a receiver from Best Buy, only a couple of miles from my home. Unfortunately the receiver was out of stock. In fact all the receivers that might have been of interest to me were out of stock. A couple of years ago, I would have driven across the street to the now defunct CircuitCity (speaking of brick and mortar retail challenges). Instead, I drove home, went online to Amazon and purchased a better receiver for less money, which was delivered a day later. Obviously, I’m not alone. Many of my friends and colleagues now make routine purchases from online e-tailers as progressively more consumers become comfortable with online searching and shopping.

My CPA buys all his books on his Kindle, as do I, a faster, easier and more cost effective alternative to the brick and mortar bookstore. The challenges for Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart, Blockbuster and Barnes & Noble are obvious, perhaps most evident by the huge electronic book display in the premium retail location at the front of the Barnes & Noble stores. B&N appears to be working hard to transition to a Kindle type operation with their new Nook. Better late than never, or simply too late for the date? Only time will tell, though their extensive brick and mortar costs may result in too much ballast for them to successfully navigate from retail to e-tail.

But retail isn’t alone in the commercial real estate challenge. Traditional office buildings will face a virtual workforce shift, as progressive companies opt for less costly and more efficient work from home staffing. This is happening with small virtual companies and giant corporations too. Working virtually has amazing advantages, from resolving the commute related issue with today’s snow storm in Boston, to using highly cost effective tools like Skype which allows multistate, multinational, multiparty video conferencing for pennies a day.

Do these changes spell the imminent destruction and removal of office buildings and big box retail? I think this is too strong a statement. There will likely be a need for many types of retail establishments, from groceries to lumber, from household items to convenience goods. And there will be office based businesses that require some or perhaps many employees to congregate. That said, the changes to brick and mortar retail and offices are upon us, gaining speed every day, as the convenience and cost efficacy of virtual business and e-tail offers a more accommodating path for the rapidly increasing, interconnected internet world.

A while back I reviewed the General Tools 500 Cordless Ultra Tech Precision Screwdriver in my search for an electric precision driver that would work well for my computer repair business, specifically for disassembling and reassembling laptop computers.

While my review was generally positive about this product, as it turned out it was not up to the task power-wise and this tool has since fallen by the wayside. So I went on the hunt again looking for a more professional grade electric precision screwdriver, which wouldn’t break the bank in the process. There are industrial-grade electric drivers made for the assembly line, but these products are very, very expensive. What I was looking for was a more professional grade unit that had a lot more power than the General Tools 500. I didn’t really care if the driver was cordless or not.

What I found was the Proxxon 28690 MIS 1 Micro Screwdriver. My first impression of this product, out of the box, was that there wasn’t much of anything “Micro” about it-it’s a beefy and weighty tool.

The Proxxon 28690 MIS 1 Micro Screwdriver sells for around $100 depending on where you buy it, and the Proxxon 3874 Heavy Duty Transformer for around $65.00, for a total investment of $165.00 or thereabouts. Pretty reasonable. Proxxon does offer a smaller and cheaper transformer, but I have no experience with this.

So how well does this product work, in this case for assembling and disassembling laptop computers?

It does make the job considerably easier and faster. When you consider the fact that the average laptop may have dozens of screws holding it together, that makes for a lot of screwing and unscrewing with a manual precision screwdriver. If you work on multiple laptops a day, this can take a toll on your hands and fingers. So any computer repair tool that can take some of the burden off your beleaguered fingers is welcome.

One common reservation a lot of computer repair technicians have about the use of an electric screwdriver for laptop repair is the increased possibility of stripping screws. While the use of such a tool does increase this risk, in actual practice this has not been an issue for me. The tool is large but you still retain a sense of touch when it comes to the driver bit. When the bits starts to skip you can feel it and hear it. My advice is that, when you first get this tool, practice on a defective laptop until you get the feel of it. You can adjust the torque on this driver, but not enough to ensure that you don’t strip a screw. That being said, hundreds of screws later I still have not stripped a screw with this device.

What I like about this screwdriver:

1. Build quality. Proxxon is known for producing high-quality tools for the hobbyist. The Proxxon 28690 is no exception. It is very solidly and durability built.
2. It comes with a generous supply of bits, 16 to be exact.
3. At first I was concerned that the on-off switch, being located at the top of the driver, and activated by the thumb rather than the forefinger, would be awkward to use. But it’s well designed in this respect, and the tool is just too big to be operated any other way. Proxxon does offer a foot-petal activation switch that can be used in conjunction with this tool.
4. Has very good power.
5. It is priced reasonably.
6. The bits are good quality, hardened metal, and should last for years.
7. Adjustable torque.

What I don’t like about this screwdriver:

1. It is too big and bulky. It is more like a slightly more compact version of a standard electric screwdriver. Again, there’s nothing “Micro” about it.
2. No quick-release mechanism for efficiently changing bits. You have to use the provided wrench to change out the bits. For this reason, out of 16 bits, I only use one for the most common laptop screw sizes. I switch to a manual driver when needed.
3. While the torque is adjustable, it is not adjustable enough to ensure that you don’t strip a screw. On the lowest torque setting it will still skip.
4. Requires a transformer, which means more $$$. I’m not sure whether there is an adapter you can get that would allow you to forgo the transformer. If so, I wouldn’t recommend it. The best thing about the Proxxon 3874 transformer is that it has a dial which allows you to adjust the rotational speed of the driver.

The “perfect” product would have the following characteristics.

1. Good power, but coupled with the ability to adjust torque sufficiently to prevent any chance of stripping screws.
2. Durably and ruggedly built.
3. Reasonably priced.
4. The ability to swap out bits quickly.
5. Ultra compact design that allows you to hold the unit between thumb and forefinger like a pen. This may be asking too much given the first requirement, that it have good power. This is the big short-coming of the General Tools 500. It has the perfect ergonomic design but it needs more power than two small batteries can provide.

Conclusion: All in all, it was a good investment in my computer repair business and it was well worth the $165.00 or so I paid for the combo. I’m still waiting for the perfect electric precision screwdriver for laptop repair. Apparently it has not yet been invented.

When a car company looks to enter a new country, the all important decision is which car they launch first as it can make or break the company. When German-owned Czech car firm Skoda decided to release their Octavia a little over a decade ago, it’s hard to imagine whether any of the head honchos at Skoda had an inkling of what they started. This car took the automotive market by storm because no one had seen a car with such levels of quality, both inside and outside. Every panel, surface, switch and knob felt solid and as tight as a drum. The paintwork consisted of several coats, so it had much better scratch resistance and the overall effect was fantastic.

All this was way back in 2001 and now, Skoda has re-launched the famous Octavia and the success story looks poised for a repeat show! The new Skoda Octavia is powered by one of three engine options – a 1.4 litre, 4 cylinder, petrol motor that churns out 138 bhp; a 1.8 litre, 4 cylinder petrol mill that delivers 177.5 bhp; and a 2.0 litre, 4 cylinder, diesel powerplant that puts out 141 bhp. The 1.4 petrol comes connected with a 6-speed manual gearbox as standard and the 2.0 diesel can be ordered with either a 6-speed manual or a 6-speed automatic transmission. However, the 1.8 TSI petrol comes only with a 7-speed, dual clutch automatic transmission. The diesel engine is a little rough around the edges but apart from that, driving this car is sublime.

The car absorbs pretty much every bump, dip and pothole with ease and when you put your foot down, the handling of the car is far crisper than several cars that are built from the ground up to be sporty. The inside of the car is such a lovely place to be. It’s swathed in all the right materials; be it leather, wood or chrome and, as always, everything feels built to last. There’s a large and beautiful panoramic sunroof, a 12-way electrically adjustable driver’s seat and cruise control on the top end variant. The other variants are by no means ignored in the features department. Depending on the variant, they get a 5.8″ touchscreen LCD display to control the infotainment system, steering-mounted controls, dual zone climate control, rear AC vents, Bluetooth telephony, rain-sensing wipers, reading and puddle lamps, cooled glove box and a cavernous boot that’s just a snatch under 600 litres.

All of this opulence can be enjoyed peacefully because the Skoda Octavia 2013 comes with oodles of gadgetry that makes it very safe as well, such as 6 airbags on the top end ‘Elegance’ variant, ABS with EBD and BA, electronic stability control, parking sensors, keyless entry with control for the doors, boot, windows and sunroof and an engine immobiliser. The 2013 Skoda Octavia price bracket ranges from just under Rs. 17 lakhs to around Rs. 24 lakhs depending on the location of the purchase and the variant in question.

But no matter which variant you buy, as almost every Skoda Octavia review will tell you, this is one cracking car to have. It is truly a worthy successor to the original Octavia we knew and loved and begs the question: With this new sedan giving more expensive cars a serious run for their money in every aspect, why would one pay truckloads more money and buy one of those? For Skoda, there was indeed no looking back after having created such a powerful first impression and although all their models have less expensive alternatives from other manufacturers, for people who understand the experience of owning and driving Skoda cars, the premium they pay is indubitably worth every penny.