The PS3 repair saga continues

The story so far - At the end of last month my PS3 displayed a non-specific hardware fault (green, yellow, red) and as I had it insured off it went to be repaired. A fortnight later it came back and 3 hours of non-continuous gameplay later it died the same way.

Off it went again and a fortnight later returned last Thursday. This time it managed to last about 9 hours before dying last night.

Checking with the insurance company the standard procedure from the repair company is to declare it unrepairable. At which point I'll be insured with vouchers to pick up a new one. Trouble is I don't have a 'new' one I have an 'old' one with backwards compatibility.

So my choice is pay £130 to Sony to get it 'repaired' and get one of theirs from their old stock (that may be new or refurbished) or give up on PS2 games and get a new one? A choice made more interesting in that Sony have registered a patent for a PS3 add-on that emulates the PS2 hardware.

As an aside it's a damn good job this happened now as re-reading my insurance they don't offer a renewal on items over 36 months old. In my case that'd be the end of October. So a month of two later and I'd have been stuffed.