I have a confession to make: I messed up at the beginning of October. The mission: deep cleaning my PS4 and replacing the CPU paste with a better product to get it running cooler and quieter. IFixIt.com has a tech walk you through the process, and it was pretty easy until one particular point. When unplugging the PS4 power supply from the motherboard, the connection point is not very strong, and I ended up ripping off the cable and connector. Turns out this is pretty common for people doing exactly what I did and cooling and cleaning the system was thoroughly addressed in the Playstation 5 design, thankfully. I finished tearing the system down to the 6 or so layers of screwed on panels that comprises the console and cleaned the dusty heat sink and removed the old paste.
My local phone repair shop wanted a $130 to solder 5 measily contact points. At the same time, OfferUp and Craigslist had sellers willing to part with their PS4 Pros for not much more than that. So 2 months waiting on unemployment and I went ahead and bought a replacement. I figured that I used the damn thing for 10 hours a day, so was able to justify shelling out for another. With that 10 hours a day of familiarity came a realization that it was the older model with a louder fan, which is what started this whole damn mess. A few days after this less-than-financially-wise decision, I got a distribution of unemployment, so that was a boost!
I mulled it over for 2 days before putting on my game face and ordering a $12 soldering kit to try and re-attach the power connector. Now, I have never soldered in my life, but am very comfortable taking things apart and learning about them. The first part was using the tip of a very sharp Xacto knife and scratching off the green tape stuff (photo to the left) that covers an equally-thin copper wire to expose a place to solder back on the part. Intense, but no problem. Then I was able to make 4 of the tiniest solder blobs on the board in some of the finest work I've ever done. Next was attaching the actual part to those solder blobs, and I ended up with a blob too big that ended up connecting ("bridging") the 3rd and 4th nodes. A valuable lesson comes right here: lead-free solder is a shitty new standard and modern electronics suffer from it. Lead is toxic when ingested, sure, but the replacement is extremely brittle and solder failure is a common reason for your electronics to stop working. Also, children aren't licking motherboards. That $12 solder iron stopped working about 30 minutes after turning it on, and it wouldn't re-melt the solder. I knew that heat was bad for electronics, so I stopped there.
I'd made it so damn far! I'll be upfront and say that buying something to use once and returning it is considered theft, so I felt about 5 seconds of remorse. However, it was hurriedly shoved into my mailbox so hard by our careless USPS person that the product broke through its packaging. Plus, not working after 30 minutes means it's a piece of trash that should be returned anyway. Besides, Amazon made $11b in profits in 2018 and didn't pay shit for corporate tax. So I got a full refund on top of a mound of valuable experience, and our mail carrier got to burn off stress with his power-shove!
In a complete turn of luck, I remembered that we have a local tool library and wanted to see if they had a high-powered solder gun to check out. This library is the bastion of frugality, anti-consumerism and sustainabilty and I love it. Turns out they were having a free drive-through repair service (to promote sustainability) and one of the techs there offered to look at my PS4 if I volunteered some hours there. This is the best kind of exchange you can make. This saint complimented me on my work but ultimately removed and relocated the power connector and as of today, I have my old favorite PS4 Pro back with its quieter fan, sparkling clean interior and dab of Arctic-MX thermal paste.
If you made it through this long ass entry, there's really just one thing to take away from this experience; locate your tool library immediately and sign up, volunteer and/or donate. I attempted this repair and got pretty damn far, as well as successfully done 3 house repairs in the last 2 weeks due to this library and my good friend Youtube.
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