The PlayStation 3 Back In Action

All in all, I'd give Sony's customer service and repair strategy pretty high marks. Everyone on the phone was helpful and friendly. Naturally, I'm still kinda annoyed the darn thing broke in the first place, but I think my media center has to take at least part of the blame.

Turnaround was very fast. They ship you the coffin 3 day, the coffin's return slip is overnight. They had a refurb out the next day, also sent 3 day. So without my own work travel delaying the show, I would have had a working unit in about ten business days.

I did take the opportunity to upgrade the HDD to a 400GB model. I don't really what I'll be doing with ten times the storage space yet, but since I already had a fresh start to begin with - it was as good of a time to do it as any other. It's crazy easy on the PS3, once I had the right sized screwdriver, took about ten minutes.

The only hangup was when we tried to rent a movie last night off the PlayStation Network. Apparently my old PS3 was still the active console for renting video, and the new one wouldn't activate while that was true. There is no way to deactivate a PS3 you don't have on hand by yourself, however. This is more than a bit of an oversight on Sony's part - they should take a page from Apple and allow you to deactivate all the devices off your account if needed.

Instead you have to call customer service to do it for you. It actually was a bit annoying, took like three phone calls to get someone who could finally get to the screen to get the job done, but once there we were good to go.

The "new" one has a 90 day warranty. While this all worked out about as well as I could hope, hopefully it won't be necessary again.