If the machine is out of warranty, it'll cost you 130 quid to fix, and if you pay a junkie half that he'll break into someone's home and steal you a new one - the maths just don't work out in favor of throwing money at Sony. I only play the PS3 so much because I love the controller, but if I came into possession of a doohickey that made it work on other consoles, I'd never bother with the PS3 again, such is the bad feeling engendered by losing everything on the machine not once but twice in the space of four months. The spare room machine went first to the red screen of death, then the same backwards-compatible model we have in the living room went out in exactly the same way you describe, and because of the model and the fact it was a communal machine, not only have we lost a ton of PS3 saves, but PS2 saves as well.
It's a sickener when it happens, not least because when the 360s have gone tits-up on us in the past we just kept the hard drive and slotted it straight onto the replacement without losing any data - when the PS3 goes tits-up, mind, you lose everything: songs, downloaded movies, pictures, tv shows, saves, downloaded games... Sony also don't exactly go out of their way to tell you that you can only use an online shopping account on five different consoles, which doesn't sound like much of a problem until your console dies and you can't deactivate the account on it: then you have four activations. Then the spare machine in the other room dies and you have three. Two years later you have none and have to buy everything all over again.
