There are a lot of different places you can get a PS3, but right off the bat I’m going to recommend that you buy one online for several reasons:
- There’s no good reason not to. Unless you need one as a birthday present for someone who’s birthday is tomorrow (and even then there’s overnight shipping) and you can actually find one available locally, there just isn’t a good reason to prefer buying one over the counter, and there’s usually a lot of good reasons not to do that (keep reading).
- You’ll tend to get better deals and better bundles online.
- You generally will not pay tax if you order online, whereas you definitely will unless you live in a state without sales tax (there are 5: Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oregon)–this will almost always make a big difference in the price: if you’re paying $300 for a PS3 (that’s about the minimum you’ll get a new one for right at this moment) plus a 5% sales tax (relatively low–it’s higher than this in most states) that’s an additional $15 you’re paying that you wouldn’t have if you would’ve ordered online. But, I hear you saying, “you’ll pay for shipping and that will end up negating the money you would’ve saved by not paying tax!”: probably not. A lot of places, like Amazon, offer free shipping.
- As I previously mentioned, you often won’t pay for shipping by ordering online.
- You won’t have warranties and other crap you don’t want pushed on you by sales people.
- You’ll be able to use coupons (keep checking back here, I’m going to post any I can find, but also use Google) that you wouldn’t have been able to use in a store anywhere because coupon codes are typically online-only.
In short: no. Here’s the deal: I have an old PS3 and recently purchased a PS3 Slim as a second unit.
Sony’s PS3 has what’s called a “Remote Play” feature, which will allow you to use a PSP to access via a wireless connection photos, videos, music, and other files that you have saved on your PS3 or external flash drives and optical media attached to the PS3 (note that this won’t work on the old 20GB PS3 because it doesn’t have WiFi).
This is a problem that a disproportionate number of PS3 owners have encountered with their systems–about 90% of the time it’s an issue with the solder connecting either the CPU or the GPU to the board melting from overheating, thereby disconnecting the CPU/GPU from the motherboard. Sony calls it a “general hardware failure” when the light comes on, and claims that it only happens to around one half of one percent of all PS3s purchased–which is still a lot, if you think about it. I encountered a fix for this on the PS3 Hacks forums that I thought I’d repost here. I’ve also the video series of the same guy (gilksy aka ColinJester) who wrote
I’ve been getting a lot of feedback from people recently about how they’re having a LOT of trouble getting their official (the one with ‘Sony’ on it that Sony guarantees is supposed to work with their own damned system, right?) Sony PS3 Bluetooth headset (usually the Socom one) to connect to their systems, to say nothing of actually getting headsets of other brands to work. I spent about 3 hours trying to get my own to connect so I could play Socom before I finally figured it out (also had two of my friends who were having problems try this, worked for them the first time as well)–the problem is that you think the headset is on and scanning and it’s not (basically–this is likely what’s happening if you end up down at “Plan B”). Ok, first I’m going to give you the standard instructions for any Bluetooth headset–these should work the majority of the time, and if they don’t then go to the second set: