Cigarette ash proves a drag for Nintendo's Wii

30th April

Really? It was supposed to be in December 2007, then January, then March, last I heard it was May and I'm certainly not holding my breath.

Well, it IS news

Well, it is news, because it seems that the drives are getting more and more fragile. Which seems kinda stupid for a piece of consumer electronics supposed to be used by everyone, without computer expertise or even knowledge that there's a lens in there at all.

E.g., my old Playstation (one) or my Dreamcast saw more than their fair share of smoke and dust, plus they often got shoved in a shoulder bag and hauled from here to there. They still work with no problems.

It's also worth noting, though, that both of those had the lens easily accessible. Just open the lid, and there it bloody is, right in front of your nose. So if you did manage to get yours dirty, you can just clean it yourself.

Of course, that too got lost in the rush to look funkier than the competition. Yeah, designer cases are cool, but don't offer the same kind of access.

Heatsink and fans? Well, those too used to be either (A) unnecessary, or (B) large, almost passive things, that had plenty of headroom to work even with restricted airflow.

By now it all probably looks like a geezer's "bah, in my times..." nostalgia, but it's not. There's a lesson about simple and robust design in consumer electronics in there. Yeah, you could rely on your users being savvy about how a DVD drive works, or sell it only to non-smokers. (There goes half your potential market, eh?) But alternately you could just make the damn thing robust or user-serviceable enough so it doesn't matter. Methinks that the latter has its own advantages, you know?

Plus, it seems to me it goes downhill even from the "no smokers" point. The whole drive to make hotter and hotter chips even in consoles seems like a losing proposition in the long run anyway. The combination of undersized heatsinks and leafblower fans means that the question isn't if you'll have a problem, but _when_. If there's _any_ dust or smoke or cooking vapours in the air, it will get sucked in and some of it will clog the fans and heatsinks. It's a design that's guaranteed to eventually fail, and we're just discovering the variability among people's home environments. For some it's sooner than expected.

And oh yeah, I should buy a good air filter just to keep a cheap console working? Heh. Why doesn't it just come with its own air filters, if it needs any? Ah, right, because they saved a few cents and passed half of that onto me the consumer... at the price of requiring me to spend a lot more money to keep the damn thing working.

Heh.

No surprise there then

Over all the years I've been working with computers, only twice have I had to deal with one that's been in the presence of a heavy smoker - and both times it's been thick with dirty yellow nicotine fluff. It's disgusting and the worst combination of two things that can most harm a PC, aside from bursts of static or drops from 100ft-high windows.

Smoke and Mirrors

B***S**T!! Don't know what kind of crap you people are buying but I've never had a problem due to smoke/tar buildup. And no, I don't keep an air filter next to my system.

We are next to a major roadway so dust is ever-present and then there's the cat with a dandruff problem. The system I'm writing this on is about five years old and the case has been left open most of that time.

The only reason I've ever had to purchase a new system or component was to upgrade.

Anti-smoking comments are so fashionable aren't they? I'll let you get back to roasting your tofu on your windmill-powered grills. Me? I'm going to go finsih my scotch and have another cigarette.

Only 3 times in 12 years...

Have I ever felt the need to clean the lens of a CD/DVD drive!

Having a mother who smoked while playing on the Best of Windows Entertainment Pack games for years, and the CD ROM still works 7 years on!

How many fags are these people smoking to gum up a lens after what 1 year? 2?

Re: Smoke and Mirrors

RTFA - it's tar buildup, not dust, that is a problem on the lens.

I think there's a simple answer - bring back console cartridges! Even a two year old bashing NES cartridges against a lego castle can't stop 'em being played - try that with your newfangled optical disks!

@ChrisC: FAIL - Dreamcast did not have a CD-ROM

The DC sported a custom 'GD-ROM' drive, made by Hitachi. DVD drives were still hideously expensive and Sega wanted to keep the BOM down. They also reckoned by using an obscure format they would keep the piracy down.

Wrong.

If you think the inside of a smokers PC / console is bad...

What about their lungs!

I open up PCs every day as part of my job and it's always the smokers' computers that have up to an inch of brown, sticky fluff and dust clogging every vent, grille, heatsink and fan... no wonder they run hot and noisy. DVD drives do seem to fail quicker in these systems, too.

Every time you light a ciggy

the Anti-smoking lobby kills a kid. And blames it on cigarette smoke.

Smokers need industrial environment okayed gear.

"...it's been thick with dirty yellow nicotine fluff. It's disgusting"

Yeah, but I guess it will kill the cockroaches dead that thought they had found a new, electrically equipped home.

@Simon King: Double fail

ChrisC is spot on, as he was talking all about lasers and the fact that CD\GD lasers don't need to do the same thing as a dual layer DVD.

Remember that a GD-ROM is just a CD with different angular velocity and data density. There is no practical difference as far as this discussion is concerned. If you actually knew what a GD-ROM was, you wouldn't get so "OMG IT HAS A G AND NOT A C" on everyone.

Anyway, I've been going through old systems lately and finding that they actually are quite delicate.

One Gamecube I could not get to read ~at all~. Had to buy a new one. While dropping for a used Dreamcast, the first one I found didn't read discs at all either, had to get another one of those.

The first Playstation I got here worked, but it's video playback is pretty choppy at times.

Sorry but these older system designs aren't magically better.

And Nintendo will clean your system anyway.

Obvious innit?

Deal with it the same way as the PC keyboard - stick the Wii in the dishwasher.

Typo

Enough of this debate on smoking, let us not forget the spelling mistake in the article.

Accumlation? No, it's accumulation

I'll get me coat.

least of my problems

I think i shall complain to nintendo about how smoking and playing their consoles at the same time leads to poor graphical performance, which in turn leads to severe eye pain.

To be expected

In these days of rampant unchecked capitalism, it's not surprising. If a manufacturer can shave a few pence off the materials cost, they will. Once, products were designed up to a specification; nowadays, they are designed down to a price.

Product unreliability ordinarily doesn't benefit manufacturers, because most consumers are smart enough not to buy the same make next time; but the situation is inverted when the manufacturer of unreliable products holds a monopoly.

If John Thomas's Panasonic stereo breaks, and he already has lots of CDs, he might buy a Philips next time. If John Thomas's Glow-worm boiler packs up in the middle of winter, he might replace it with a Worcester boiler. But if John Thomas's Wii breaks, and he already owns several games, he has precious little choice but to buy another one from Nintendo. The games may well have cost more than the console -- it would be a waste not to have anything on which to play them.

Just wait till the current generation of gamers are old enough to become MEPs! The EU will come down hard on this blatant anti-competitive behaviour; and, once other manufacturers are allowed to make compatible consoles, manufacturers will be forced to compete on merit.

Pussies

They're obviously not inhaling properly!