VIN units will need to be either with the car or at least have a copy of the VIN or Chassis number of the vehicle it’s going into.

Cost of VIN unit decode  is £25

Vauxhall CD30 decode is £25 – this is for either reading code ( if it’s going back to original vehicle) or for putting into ‘delivery mode’ – this will then require main dealer or advanced diagnostic garage to ‘pair’ unit to car …… main dealers can’t put unit into ‘delivery mode’.

for a full list of units  supported   -  click here

Vauxhall CD30 - this popular unit is not only coded , it's also tech2 'married' to the car using diagnostic tools.

If your Playstation 3 experiences a flashing yellow light, or the lights going from green to yellow, then blinks red, then we can fix it for you. This is usually a problem with the motherboard, it’s the PlayStation’s equivalent of the XBox 360 3 red light fault  - the GPU develops ‘cold’ solder joints underneath , which we can fix for much less than Sony charges (£140) and also won’t lose all your gamesaves or downloads .

Ps3 Yellow Light of Death

Cost of work is £65

• Yellow light problem, resulting in PS3 not working
• Labour to eliminate yellow light problem.
• Soak testing to ensure a reliable fix
• 90 day warranty on parts and labour.
• Machine is completely stripped -reflowed – cleaned internally to ensure good cooling
• Artic silver heatsink on CPU/GPU

Please note that you will find that some repair shops offer an express service for this repair. In our experience these provide the least reliable fixes that do not last long. We use the best reflow techniques and the most rigorous testing process to ensure that the repair is of the highest quality and most reliability.

As with XBox and PS3 there is no 100% success rate – occasionally the board has suffered ‘ circuit pads/tracks lifting ‘ – this problem is not repairable and the motherboard would be rendered useless. Again – cooling is the key to a long life .. always ensure a good airflow .. hoover out the vents every month or so .. if you’re using it for extended gaming , give the machine a break every now and then – press and hold the eject button while switching it on (not 60G) .. this runs the fans full until it’s cooled down.

XBox 360 Modifications

We can modify your drive to allow machine to play back-ups or discs from other regions.

iXtreme firmware upgrades

Firmwares available at the moment are;

• Lite-On drive     iXtreme 1.61  (wave4 compatible)
• Benq  iXtreme 1.61  (wave4 compatible)
• Hitachi    iXtreme 1.51
• Toshiba    iXtreme 1.61  (wave4 compatible)
• Samsung   iXtreme 1.61  (wave4 compatible)

Cost of service is £50 - we guarantee not to brick your console.

If we’ve modded your console before and it needs an upgrade to play a new wave of security – we discount the charge to £20 .

Fan / Cooling modifications

Most problems with 360’s are down to too much heat in too small a box.

Upgraded heatsink for GPU - found in later machines and Elite consoles

We keep upgraded heatsinks and also small internal add on fans to keep your machine cool  . Also possible is an increase in fan speed to allow airflow to be greater – it should be noted that this mod causes more noise and isn’t suitable for the average gamer – the fans can be a bit noisy ! .

Upgraded fan mods are fitted using Artic silver 5 heat-sink compound to ensure the best possible heat transfer.

Mods from £25 +

Contract customers can unlock their IPhones right now, although you’ll still be in the o2 contract until it expires or you buy yourself out of it.

Pay monthly customers will have to pay £14.69 to unlock their IPhones.

All this can be done now from the O2 Unlock My IPhone page.

However, if you bought your IPhone second hand and you can’t get the original owner to fill out the form on the O2 page above then you are out of luck, O2 link the phone’s IMEI number to the name and details of the original customer. Even ringing Apple to update your details with them won’t help. O2 basically need proof that you are now the legitamate owner of the phone, some people have however managed to argue their case with o2.

For people selling their IPhone for an upgrade it’s worth unlocking before you sell it, not only does it make life easier for the rest of the IPhone buying public but it also means you will get a bit extra if you sell the phone via ebay for example.

Still need an Unlock / Jailbreak?

Remember that we can jailbreak / unlock your IPhone for £20. Although you void Apple’s warranty by doing this, they cannot actually tell if you did this if you do a simple restore before passing them the phone for repairs / warranty.

Contact us for more information.

Replacing BlueRay Drive: £99
We only use original Sony PS3 drives and replace the complete drive (not just the laser) - There are a large number of  ‘reclaimed’ and also ‘quality control failed’  lasers circulating – especially on eBay.

Full Sony ps3 Blue ray drive unit - complete mechanism

from our experience they have a very high failure rate – check out the sellers warranty – usually no more than 60 days. We have a source for good laser units , they are a little more expensive but we don’t want your Sony Playstation 3 bouncing back to us under warranty.

Firmware crashes: £45

The common symptom of a firmware crash is when there is no menu, only ‘wave’ on screen. We can format the hard drive, reinstate the file system and update the firmware to the latest version available. Your gamesaves and downloads should also be retained.

Replace hard drive: from £48

There are many symptoms of this such as being unable to load games (writing game data to HDD), the machine not starting up, being unable to complete a firmware update, no picture,  constantly being told the machine has a file system problem. We can replace the HDD and update the firmware – Drives come in 40G,  60G  and 80G. Noticeably the 80G is more prone to failure.

No video output: from £55

Yellow Light Faults : read this page

Please contact us if you have any questions related to Playstation 3 repairs.

Visit our forums at http://www.svtservices.co.uk/forum/

Register for an account at http://svtservices.co.uk/forum/register.php

Why does it happen ?

It’s down to basic physics – there are two metals involved one copper the other aluminium, when they heat up they expand and move. The graphics or GPU gets very hot the more graphically involved the game is – it’s been said that ‘gears of war’ is a 360 killer …it’s because the graphics are so good.

Notice the 'legs' of the chip are underneath and inaccessable when fitted

Once the chip or GPU has heated and cooled a few hundred times it starts to break the solder contacts connecting itself to the motherboard – instant 3 red lights ! If it’s the CPU or processor (same thing happens) it’s 1 red light or E74. Now most people will think ‘OK I’ll just re-solder it or re-flow it?’. Unless you’ve got £2.5K worth of equipment (your average bedroom technician won’t!) and around an hour to remove the GPU (reball it) and presuming the tiny pads are OK (they tend to break off) and then hot air re-flow (with the correct jig) and then rebuild it ……… you may just be in with a chance of  repair.

You can see the process done correctly in the following video….

Beware of false promises

There are many places around that offer a ‘fix’, this usually involves heating it with a heatgun and clamping it with an ‘x-clamp’, all this does is force the broken solder joints together, this is not reliable at all as it’s not soldered together mearly touching. Have a look at the warranty period they offer, it’s usually no longer than 60 days,that’s how long the average x-clamp lasts! Buyer beware!

The Important Bit

The old xbox 360 seal

Microsoft have a warranty for this fault and also for E74 faults.

This means that if your warranty seal is intact  then you are entitled to a free repair – this will be a new motherboard – the only real 100% guaranteed  repair. The machine will be collected by courier and returned a couple of weeks later.If the seal is broken or your machine has been banned from Microsoft Live , you will find the console is returned back within a week to 10 days without being repaired with a letter explaining why.

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The new XBOX 360 seal

Seal Broken ?

If your seal is broken whether it’s in warranty or not .. then a repair is possible – this involves reflowing the chips that are causing the machine to malfunction.

Further reading

For more information visit our XBOX 360 repair page and please feel free to contact us if you have any questions.

A couple of the common issues we can provide prices for are…

Wii DVD drive repair: from £35 -

• Two discs jammed inside
• Toys/cards ect jammed / inserted in by accident
• Not accepting discs
• Not edjecting discs
• Grinding noise from drive (teeth broken)

Wii DVD failed mod repair: from £30 (corrupt firmware due to failed softmod not always repairable)

• Failed Wiikey mods
• Broken damaged tracks
• Sync control not working

Regardless of the problem, if your Wii is out of warranty then bring it down for us to have a look at and we’ll provide you with a free repair quote. If you have any questions or want more information then please contact us.

Please bring your console in, we’ll take a look and provide you with a quote. The most common issues are priced below…

XBOX 360 3 red light repair:

ALSO APPLIES TO ;

1  RED LIGHT

2  RED LIGHTS

E74 REPORTED

E73 REPORTED

Work involves re-flowing GPU and RAM chips to rectify cold solder joints -

Our infra-red re-flow station and other service equipment required for Xbox360 service/repair

The unit is stripped down to motherboard and placed onto an infra-red reflow workstation – the board is fluxed and brought up to reflow temp (210 c) this action reforms the solder underneath the CPU and should ‘reconnect’ all the pins. Unfortunately this doesn’t always work as it has become apparent that the tracks underneath the GPU are sometimes damaged - hence the machine is beyond repair.

This happens in 10 – 15% of consoles. Occasionally we get machines that fail once they have been returned and are under heavy use -  so we give a 3 month warranty on all re-flows … we will try the process again, if it fails to repair then we provide a full refund of repair costs.

Currently we charge £47 for this work – we don’t offer a ‘while you wait’ or 2 hr service like other repair companies … we like to test the machines for a full 24hrs to ensure it’s going to be reliable. Once the repair has been done – we don’t want to see it back ! =)

We are in the process of developing a re-ball service where the solder is replaced with normal leaded solder which flexes more – eliminating the 3 red light issue for good.

XBox 360 drive repair

We keep a stock of all drives that are found in Xbox360’s currently there are a number of different drives used.

Microsoft Xbox 360 original drive

• Toshiba
• Philips Lite-on
• Benq
• Hitachi
• Samsung

On most occasions the drive can only be replaced with the make that’s originally been fitted – to make things more complicated the drives are ‘keyed’ to the machine i.e. you can’t just hop on to eBay and buy one and fit it – it won’t work! .There is a ‘Drive-key’ that has to be extracted first and then programmed into the new drive. This complicates things greatly, if for some reason the ‘drive-key’ is lost due to a fault in the drive or due to a bad ‘upgrade’ then the machine is worthless …. the key can’t be recovered from the motherboard (to date).

Cost of drive repair (for all makes) is £47

We can also mod your XBox to allow backups

XBOX 360  console  mod: read this page

XBOX 360  mod upgrade: read this page

Please contact us if you have any questions about repairs, mods or more information.