I bought my first PS3 in european launch date. Last year the YLOD visited me. I don't recommend to give money to fix it for less than 6 months. Yes, mine had PS/PS2 backward compatibility as well, but actually I never played any PS/PS2 game. So, I forced to buy the only available PS3 console, which right now is the Super Slim model.

The fu**ing thing is that your HD is locked, and unfortunately it cannot be read in another PS3, even if you find the exactly same model (FAT). Probably they want to sell PLUS subscriptions in order to have their Cloud service to save your savegames there.
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I still have my launch PS3 as well. It should still be working, but the HD in it died a few years back and I haven't used it since. Wasn't the original HD in it, back when I got it I immediately switched the original 60Gb for a 200GB one. I wasn't sure that it was the HD that had died and since I didn't want to lose any saves I instead bought a new slim console which didn't cost that much anyway and tried moving the HD over there. Found out that it indeed was the HD that died though, so had lost everything. But from what Phantom is saying, it wouldn't have worked anyway? You can't migrate HDs between PS3s? That was news to me.

That's when I signed up for PS+ by the way, to prevent such a loss from happening again. No regrets though, PS+ is a great value and I definitely recommend it.
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