Two years after the last time our Wii showed signs of death by thermal failure, the repaired Wii is once again succumbing from heat death.
Now, the Wii will play fine for about 5 to 10 minutes and then just turn off entirely — no lights, nothing.
Before trying to fix it myself, I checked Nintendo’s customer support sight. Gone is any sense of personal account and, instead, I was told that’d cost $75 + s/h + tax to repair the now-out-of-warranty Wii; about $95 or, in other words, just about 1/2 the cost of a new Wii.
To be absolutely fair, Nintendo’s customer service has been absolutely top notch. $75 (+shipping & taxes for CA residents — $95) for a fix-any-problem service with a solid turnaround time of about 10 days (though it generally takes less) is actually very good.
A replacement optical drive — another component that oft goes flaky due to dust, dirt, or abuse — cost about $50 to $60 and are quite time consuming to replace. Thus, for some fixes, $75 is beyond fair.
Of course, there is no [non-hacky] way of moving all data and purchased content from an “old” Wii to a “new” Wii, thus replacing the unit with a new — hopefully better built — Wii isn’t viable. Not that letting Nintendo fix a Wii is that much better; they have a tendency to screw up your data in the process.
Fine. $95 and no options. Let me do some basic triage…
As it turns out, the Wii’s fan was jammed. Probably with pet hair or, hell, with one of my über-long bits of hair from my long haired days. And it was dusty, too. That could certainly be a problem!
After the fix described below was applied, the unit played quite stably for more than an hour, something that was impossible before.
So, if you are suffering from the same symptoms — spontaneous power down during play — you might want to give this a try before paying the vigNintendo to fix what is, otherwise, about $1.50 in parts (assuming they don’t do the same as below!).
- Disconnect everything from the Wii and take it to a decent bright light (a flashlight will do).
- Take a micro-screwdriver, toothpick, or something similar and very gently try and move the fan blades visible inside the vent on the rear of the unit. If there is any resistance, you have a stuck fan!
- Spin the blade a few times with your poky-stick thing. If you can’t, you have an über-stuck fan and your choices are to replace it yourself or pay Nintendo ~$90 to do it for you.
- Grab a vacuum cleaner that has a hose attachment.
- Turn on the vacuum and place the end of the hose over the vent for a few seconds. You’ll likely hear that spinny-whistly-noise of a fan spinning up in a fast rush of air. Hopefully.
- Put the Wii back and reconnect everything.
- Fire up a game, turn down the audio volume, and listen for the whir of the Wii’s fan. Or have a look.
The end result might be a working Wii. If not, nothing lost as none of this procedure leaves any kind of a mark (if done right — you go sticking a metal bar into the fan and breaking off a blade is your own damned fault).
Looking more closely at the Wii, it appears that there are one of numerous design flaws in play here.
First, given the number of thermal problems reported by various folk, it is quite clear that Nintendo shoved too much crap into too small of a box without properly accounting for the thermal envelope required.
Secondly, the old-school GameCube memory card slots create quite a vent that leads directly to the fan below and behind the slots. Feeling the airflow when applying The Suck, it feels like those slots will quite happily draw anything in and dump it right on the fan! It makes me wonder if there is a correlation between fan breakage and folks that enjoy GameCube games and, more pertinently GameCube saves on GameCube memory cards?
In any case, our Wii is working again. Even if it is only makes it through the next week or so, it is going to make Christmas morning considerably happier (as it would suck to be all like “Here, son, awesome new game… you can only play it for ten minutes at a time and you’ll lose your saves. Have fun!”.
pictured at left.
are top notch, too.
— was enticed by the name, obviously — but the combination of a hot bottom plus sides that shed heat rapidly meant that the coffee quickly turned ultra-nasty flavored. Yuck. The Bunn will prove useful; it turns out it heats water to pretty much the perfect temperature for brewing certain kinds of green tea that don’t tolerate boiling water without yielding bitter flavors!
