Well my 80GB PS3 I bought at Thanksgiving last year is broken. When playing BD movies it will freeze and occasionally lock up intermittently. I can sometimes get the discs to resume if I power cycle but it usually will freeze up again. Started happening about two weeks ago with a Netflix disc which we thought was defective. The replacement froze and then I saw freezing on two discs that we own.

It appears to be a problem with sustained reading of BD discs because I've been gaming a lot in the past two weeks (i played through Uncharted and Heavenly Sword) and haven't had a single problem. I get to call Sony tonight and hopefully get a replacement quickly.

After the false start last night, Life with Playstation is officially here. Dowload or run Folding@Home and it will update itself to become Life with Playstation. It's pretty basic right now, but it should become pretty cool.

... and what is Life with Playstation and why will it be cool if it isn't right now?

Life is a news/weather feature similar to the Weather/News features on the Wii.

Yes it is ... I tried it out this morning.

I wish they'd add the ability to set your starting city instead of just basing it on timezone ... it seemed to default to New York for me. There aren't many cities yet either.

Like NY's weather is going to be that different than Miami's in the coming months.

Ha ... I was wishing I was in Seattle this morning after seeing their mid-50s temps.

And oops, I stand corrected. It's defaulting to DC, not NY. Still not as helpful. :p

The default news isn't very good either.

All in all, not bad for version 1.0, but they need to add more customization (user-defined news keywords, RSS feeds, traffic alerts by zip code, etc.) to make this worth firing up every morning.

So is this a way to trick everyone to do folding or is Folding@Home gone.

Yeah, they just renamed Folding@home and added some new features to its globe view. The processing is still running in the background when you're looking at the new features, and you can switch to the same old Folding@home view by changing "channels" in the program.

Well I live outside DC so it works for me

I don't get it. Why would one have to be "tricked"? Would you like to run "Life" without running F@H at the same time?

I have a pretty big question, this will be long so just bear with me. I just hooked up my new home theater system with my PS3, and am having some problems. Here is my equipment.

Samsung 32" LCD TV LN-T3253H
60 gb Playstation 3
Onkyo HT-R550 Receiver.

When I went to hook it up, I hooked up the hdmi cable through the tv, then used an digital optical cord for the sound through the receiver. Dvds sound great it recognizes all audio tracks and plays them beautifully, but when I went to play a blu-ray it say it only recognizes it as 2-channel PCM. I went through the audio settings and set everthing properly according to receiver settings. So I decided to buy an extra hdmi cable and ran it through the receiver and then to the tv, then set the proper audio settings, to DD5.1, DTS 5.1, and then pcm 7.1 audio. Picture looks fine but the audio doesn't work. Any help as soon as possible would be greatly appreciated thanks.

Did you remove the optical cable, and switch the audio output setting to hdmi?

yes

Try changing the output from Bitstream to PCM also. FYI, the reason you were outputting 2 channel is that PCM is limited to 2 channel over TOS cables.

Did you go through the different audio settings under the "BD/DVD Settings" section, not just the "Sound Settings" section? I can't help with the HDMI part, but I had the same optical audio problem as the first half of your post. Under "BD/DVD Settings," I had to change "BD Audio Output Format (Optical)" to bitstream instead of PCM.

I believe the 550 is a passthrough-only receiver (no audio processing). Unless I'm mistaken, you'll have to run the optical anyway. Blu-rays, when selected with "Bitstream", will send 5.1 Dolby Digital but only 2-channel PCM through optical, while standard-definition DVDs will still pour through Dolby, DTS, etc. that can be processed by your receiver.

Thanks for the help I will try the BD/DVD settings, but you are right the 550 is only a pass through. I just want my blu-rays to at least play DD 5.1 or DTS 5.1. I might upgrade to a different receiver in the near future that I can hookup my ps3 to it and get trueHD and DTS-MA.

What's this Nyko Zero controller in the Amazon lightning deal? Customer reviews are very mixed.

Anyone getting Pure?

Demo is pretty damn fun.

Not sure of its worth 60 bucks...

I know it has the trick angle which makes it different, but I just think it's kind of redundant because of Motorstorm and its upcoming sequel. It's not as if I need another racing game.

I might get it when it's $20 though.

I'm probably going to pickup Pure with the $20 GC I got from the Toys R Us deal of Star Wars: TFU.

Upgraded my HDD to 320 GB last night. Absolutely painless. 30 minutes each way to backup and restore. Now I just need to get an enclosure for the 40 GB drive it came with.

Rewarded Sony for making this so easy to do by purchasing some games off PSN - Pain and Aquatopia. Pain is a ton of fun.

I received my 320gb drive the other day. I have a portable FAT32 drive with a bunch of files already on it (pictures, music, etc)... can I just use that drive to backup my PS3 stuff or do I actually have to partition it specifically for the PS3 stuff?

I don't think so.
It does create a few folders and then the backup file is named with the date and time, ie: 200909231754.