Hello there, thanks a lot for viewing my guide.

This is a brief guide on how to sort out the most frequent problems which you may have experienced with your Playstation 3. These problems are usually a red light on PS3 or the yellow light on PS3. Both of these errors are because of a malfunction on the motherboard. This does not have to mean that your Playstation 3 is broken completely. There's a relatively easy fix.

The first thing to do is see if there is a loose cable, and if there is not, try to restart your console. Then try disconnecting all of the cables with the exception of the power cable, and then plug them back in. Hopefully that will do it. But if its still not working which will probably be the case, then proceed to the next step.

Unfortunately the CPU and GPU have become detached on the motherboard, which causes the blinking red light or PS3 yellow light and you will need to get inside and make a repair. Don't worry, this isn'difficult and requires absolutely no electronics skills at all.I wouldn't have been able to do it if it was complicated.

You need to disassemble your Playstation 3 and strip it down to get at the motherboard. You will require a phillips and a flathead screwdriver to do this. Make sure that you clean any dust and fluff that may have got inside whilst you are doing this.Its a good opportunity to do this kind of maintenance. You'll know when you have found the motherboard. Its kind of obvious as it is a large green circuit board. Its the only one there.

In the centre you will see two square pieces of circuitry that are covered in a greyish-blue paste. These are the heat sinks. You need to clean off this paste using an Isopropyl alcohol (which can be found in most computer shops) or turpentine. An alcohol based cleaning wipe works well too.

Once both of these are completely cleaned you need a heat gun and set it to 315 degrees C. As I didn't have one I used a hair dryer on max settings. You will then need to heat the whole of the board through, front and back for a couple of minutes, holding the heat gun about an inch above the board. Then focusing the heat on the heat sinks and the surrounding bits of circuitry for about 25 seconds each. Those times are for the heat gun. Your hair dryer may not be as hot as that so I would focus on the board for about 10 minutes, and then on the individual bits of circuitry for approximately a minute each. Doing that worked for me. When done leave the motherboard alone for 15 minutes. DO NOT TOUCH or you will have to start again.

This part of the process is the repair. What you are essentially doing is heating up the solder in the bad circuitry enough so that it can repair itself and make aworking conncetion. During the time that the solder is cooling it is setting. If you touch the board during this time it could go wrong again and you would have to begin again.

After 15 minutes you have to reapply fresh thermal paste to the heat sinks. Remember that greyish-blue paste you cleaned off? I recommend that you use a proper thermal paste such as Arctic Silver 5. Again you can find this at most computer shops, and it doesn't cost very much. But, for a temporary fix you may use toothpaste (yes I said toothpaste) to act as the thermal paste. But I repeat, this is only a temporary fix. Just smear a small amount finely over the heat sinks evenly using a credit card or something else small and flat. You should almost be able to see through the paste. Do this to both heat sinks.

Put back together your Playstation 3 console and you're done. Power on your PS3 and you should find that the red light on PS3 or yellow light of death, whichever light you had, has been repaired.

So thats my guide finished. Following this guide you could save $150-$200 from Sony's repair bill. You could also make sure that you keep the data on your hard drive as Sony would send you back a reconditioned one with a blank hard drive. You could have your machine back working in less than an hour instead of waiting up to 6 weeks.

Hope this page has been helpful to fix your PS3 flashing red light problem.

Thanks for reading.