I had a bit of bad luck recently, what with my car accident and then my beloved PS3 died on me. Great, rang Sony and they refused to replace it. They offered me a 'refurb' unit at £130 and only 3 months warranty. See you later Sony.
Youtube revealed a series of YLOD fixes and most of them were based on the old trick 'turn power on whilst pressing the EJECT button on the BluRay drive'. No help to me with my launch 60Gb PS3.
One of the videos by a northern bloke called 'gilksy' pointed me in the direction of a possible fix. I took my PS3 round my mates house and performed the fix, which basically involved reflowing the solder on the board. It took us a couple of hours in total, and we did 20 seconds of 300C heat.
This didn't work.
3 days later, I tried again on my own - and used 40-45 seconds of 300C heat. Put it all back together and it WORKED!!!!
Very pleased with the result. The only difference to gilksy's procedure was that I used a drinks mug to support the BGAs when being heated from the underside.
What a total result! :-)
JB