Through pretty much all of covid, my PlayStation 4 has been acting up. In the middle of games of Rocket League, the thing would just decide it didn’t want to participate anymore. Obviously, I don’t blame it. If you’ve played Rocket League, you understand that this is a shared desire. But the friends I play with cared because it left them a man down.

While the solid white light problem remained despite replacement of the HDMI cable, using a hole saw to cut two holes in the back of the cabinet that houses my PS4 and the rest of my stuff to increase the flow of air, putting a fan in front of the area that has my ps4 so it can cool it down. Nothing worked.

Then I encountered a new problem: The PS4 flashed blue when I tried powering it on. I had to disconnect power altogether and then reconnect power to get it even to react to starting up, at which point it reminded me that I hadn’t powered it off correctly. I know I didn’t power it off correctly, but I also know I will die before the thing would power itself off correctly, and I don’t have that kind of time (you know, by definition).

I had told my fiancee that it’s lucky that our wedding has been facing delays because I’ll get to register for a PS5, and then all my troubles will be gone. She could have been more receptive to that suggestion, and she hasn’t yet warmed up to it, despite frequent attempts to make it an obvious choice.

I started looking online for places that can fix the PS4 that are near me and won’t make me walk through the doors of a building. Lots of results! But then I looked at what it would cost me, and I figured it was easier to be inconvenienced.

But then I came upon discussions of swapping out the hard drive.

That led to research on the hard drive I’d want to get to just start anew. I got close to ordering one from amazon that had reviews that stated it was perfect for PS4. Promising for sure! The cost was about $80, which is OK, I guess, but I still felt like I needed to let it breathe before making a decision.

Then I remembered something exciting: My fiancee had a hard disk drive that she had swapped out for an SSD for her computer. She didn’t need the old drive and wanted to destroy it. I had said that it sounded like fun to destroy it. But we hadn’t yet destroyed it.

I went to the cardboard box where the HDD was stashed and saw that the drive was the right size and had the specs I wanted! I’m fine with a 500GB drive and definitely didn’t need a 2TB. I backed up the stuff on my PS4 and then swapped in the replacement drive that cost me $0. So far no problems with the PS4, and it’s now downloading Rocket League and FIFA20. I should have staggered the downloads rather than installing them at the same time because they’re both making their way along and will finish at about the same time.

I’ll get to play later and see if there’s any improvement from the old drive.

I’m hoping for the best.