Turns out the PS3 (the old fat one, not the new slim) had a “Millenium Bug” style fault. It thought/thinks that 2010 is a leap year, so the consoles date & time for 1st March 2010 actually set to 29th Febuary 2010. So far so boring, but that caused a major problem. Once the PS3 was switched on and went online it did what it apparently always does and checkes it’s own clock against the clock on the PlayStation Network. Now since 29th Febuary 2010 doesn’t actually exist, the PS3 throws a panic and sets it’s date back a few years. The result of that…the connection to the Playstation Network fails. And some games will not operate as the DRM checks go potty when they realise you’re trying to play a game that hasn’t even been written yet. Presumably Sony don’t want you playing games from the future eh?

The official Sony blog were awash wish outraged gamers who couldn’t use their PS3′s, but Sony did say the problem “should” correct itself once the PS3′s internal clock had rolled over to 1st March 2010 (ie a date that exists). It did for me – just past midnight the PS3 started up perfectly and connected to the PSN, and there didn’t appear to be any damage (like lost game saves).

I couldn’t believe how angry some people were about this. Sure. it’s not exactly something you would expect, but sometimes these kinds of things do happen. I’m certainly not angry about it – the PS3 is such an awesome piece of hardware. If you think the grass is greener on the other side, just see how many results you get for “Broken XBox” on a Google search – their hardware is nowhere near as robust.

The other thing I thought was great was how Google responded to this. Just by Googling “Playstation Network” the top result was a news entry letting me know what had happened. I was watching TV and neither SKY nor the BBC seemed to be reporting it, but were doing the usual reporting about the same news items they’d been talking about all day long.

Firstly (this is more for the event the laptop ends up going to someone else) I ran the create recovery media wizard so it can if needs be get back to it’s factory installed state. You ought to do this too just in case.

Second, completely wiped the harddisk by deleting all the partitions, creating a new one and formatting. Quickest way to accomplish this is with a good boot disc – I used the Ultimate Boot CD for this.

First problem – XP isn’t going to recognise the hard disk controller as it’s not in it’s driver section. You could go for the F6 option during the XP install and load the drivers from a floppy disc, but of course this machine doesn’t have a floppy and I’m not about to buy a piece of 90′s hardware to fix this 2010 machine. Find your driver then slipstream your XP installation disc using nLite. It’s not nearly as hard as it sounds, and nLite is a free download. You’ll just need access to a machine running Windows, your Windows Disc, a copy of your Drive Controller Driver and a blank CD.

Then you can install XP. On a side note, I installed XP Pro using OEM media, but the license key from my old VAIO that this one replaced. Didn’t seem to cause any issue at all, and activated online without a hitch. Once you’re up & running you’ll need to find drivers for all the hardware so you end up with a device manager that looks like mine does:

Everything as it should be. Wireless networking, ethernet, bluetooth, camera, media keys, card reader etc all functioning. It’s a pig of a job to find drivers that will work though, so be warned. Here are some links that may, or may not help:

Modding ATI Catalyst. Basically, you probably won’t get the right driver from ATI for a laptop – they will tell you to go to your Laptop Manufacturer (Sony in my case). Sony haven’t made an XP driver for any of my hardware as they don’t support it, so modding the Catalyst is the only option. It works and it’s free.

Sony Vaio FTP Driver Archive. Basically, Sony may not have written XP drivers for my machine, but they have for plenty of others and the hardware in them is all the same stuff. I just used drivers from similar models.

HP (for the Ricoh Card Reader) This was the last one I had trouble locating. In device manager it was simply listed as “Base System Device” so finding out what it actually was was the first trick before I could start trying to find a driver.

There are other places on the web purporting to have XP drivers for Sony VAIOs, but treat them with caution and virus scan anything and everything you download.

Good luck.

***UPDATE***

Just realised this post needs the following added:

I crumbled and bought the 40GB version. Turns out the 60GB was withdrawn from sale due to a rather embarrassingly high failure rate. I was concerned that the backwards compatibility was missing, and still am although I really don’t understand what the problem is, and why backwards compatibility with the PS2 needed to be done through hardware. Here’s what I think. The PS2 was powered by a 300MHz RISC processor (a single core). The PS3 is powered by the cell – a multi core (there are 7 cores) processor that runs at 3.2 GHz. Now I’m crap at mathematics, but if you could squeeze the miracles that the PS2 achieved with ONE 300MHz CPU, you really ought to be able to create a stable emulator if you have SEVEN 3.2 GHz CPU’s available purely in software, or am I missing something? The sneaky suspicion of course is that Sony don’t want me (as a PS3 owner) having access to a huge catalogue of cheap PS2 games.

As a footnote, Call of Duty 4 is without doubt the best FPS I’ve ever seen, but I can’t play it because Activision/Infinity/Sony saw fit to not bother including mouse support. I angry as a hornet about that, and may well end up buying this.

GT5 Prologue is just so damn impressive and enjoyable I set up a new GT5 Blog just to talk about it.

Problem 1. After the install routine has completed I try hooking up the camera. A warning flashes up that I should have installed Macromedia Flash Player. This’ll sound odd perhaps, but I don’t need Flash on my machine, so I’ve never installed it. If webmasters are daft enough to craft websites using Flash that’s their lookout and their loss.

Problem 2. I bite the bullet and install Flash (having a feeling I will be rolling back the machine with a system restore or maybe formatting the whole drive again to clean this mess up…) and guess what? The Sony software doesn’t recognize my DVDRW drive. The real stinger is my computer is a Sony Vaio – they don’t support their OWN HARDWARE.

Then it occurred to me that I’d been going about it the wrong way. I already have Nero and the “Nero Vision” part of the suite does video capture. Now Nero DOES recognize my DVDRW drive so I thought I’d be onto a winner. Unfortunately, it CAN’T recognize the Sony Camcorder!

The only thing left to try would be to re-install the copy of Adobe Premiere that came with the laptop originally but I’m loathe to do that due to a complete lack of faith that it will actually work, and my undying hatred of Adobe in general.

Next attempt will involve some actual video capture hardware. Let’s face it, there must be a way to get this to work.