Posted by AndyG as Wii Polls at 12:09 AM EST
Been a rough past few days as the weather has played havoc on my system here in Texas leaving not only me with various cold related issues, but my Wii seems to have also started acting up. Perhaps it’s sympathy but nonetheless, it’s started to make the sound of a drill or something similar when starting up now. Like a groaning whine that is fairly inconsistent meaning it doesn’t do it constantly or all the time, but about 90% of the time. I figured it’s time to send it in before the warranty is out, no? We don’t smoke but we do have 3 cats in the house, maybe some cat hair snuck in and clogged up a motor or two. Whatever the problem, I’ll be contacting Nintendo support very soon to go through the motions of getting it fixed and I thought as a treat for those that aren’t quite sure what’s involved in getting your Wii repaired, I would video the whole experience to show how painless (or painful) the process is. I hear Nintendo is great with customer service, so I expect it to be a no issue and overall very positive video. To be clear, the system still plays perfectly and has not scratched a disk, I just don’t want this situation to go from hairy to worse after my warranty expires.
This leads us to this week’s poll where I wonder if any of you fine readers have had to have your Wii repaired. I know other console failure rates are large enough that a poll of this sort would perhaps garner a 30% rate of failure in terms of who has vs who has not had an issue, but I’m not sure I expect to see too many of you out there that have had to send their Wii in as of yet. It’s really a very stable machine that hasn’t been prone to failure. So without further ado:
Dragoniv Said,
January 23, 2008 @ 12:17 am
Our launch day Wii died just after Christmas 2006–and with a gaming birthday party coming up for my son in the third week of January, things were looking pretty grim.
However, Nintendo managed to turn it around in just over two weeks, and the unit arrived the day of the party. We lost all our progress in Wii Sports, mostly because our only SD backup was shortly after we got the unit, and of course we lost all of our Miis. However, several of them traveled back to our new unit after apparently visiting some of the folks we had linked our old unit to. Pretty funny–we have a few Mii twins now.
Kevin Said,
January 23, 2008 @ 9:14 am
The only “motors” that are in the unit would be the fan. A bit of compressed air blown into the breather holes may do the trick of stopping this.
teedub Said,
January 23, 2008 @ 1:12 pm
Had ours repaired in May for the strange video issues. Our Miis were rendered uneditable, but all other information remained intact and I just had to re-download my VC games. Even my Wii Points and saved games were still there. I’d still backup everything you can on an SD card. Only took a few weeks, and the service was great.
Mario Said,
January 23, 2008 @ 4:01 pm
Mine also started making that drilling sound one month ago, after exactly one year from purchase.
I haven’t contacted Nintendo yet but I’ll do it right now, before my three months warranty extension expires.
alfredo Said,
January 23, 2008 @ 5:50 pm
i dont know if this might need repairing but my wii makes a strange clicking sound during gameplay in games like guitar hero and harry potter OoTP. and when i put in a disc it makes a hissing sound (i think its the fan) so im worried i hope nothing goes wrong i have alot of games that took me weeks to pass and i just got pro in golf in wii sports which was pretty hard to do XD
Dragoniv Said,
January 24, 2008 @ 10:45 am
Clicking sound–very present on both Guitar Hero and NFS Pro Street. What that is is simply the DVD head jumping back and forth over the media. Read: very poor layout of files on the disc, which causes unnecessary wear and tear on the drive. It’s not a sign of failure, though, so no worries.
Fans make whirring sounds typically. Hissing sound might be the the disc brushing against the drive…that might be a problem, especially if the hissing sound doesn’t go away just after the disc goes in.
Word to the wise for preserving WiiSports: Not only back your game up to an SD card regularly, but also save the Miis you use on your Wiimotes, since records are tied to Miis in that game.
wiiboy101gezza Said,
January 24, 2008 @ 5:25 pm
ITS MADE BY NINTENDO NUFF SAID AMASING BUILD QUOLITY COUGH BILL GATES COUGH SONY
alfredo Said,
January 25, 2008 @ 9:23 pm
THANK YOU VERY MUCH Drangoniv i was getting worried and since my 1 year warranty or something like that XD is almost reaching an end i was even more petrified. so thank you again for explaining those things i encountered :]
oh and one question if i saved all my game data to an SD card and then erased them off the internal memory of the wii and stuck the SD card in would i still be able to have that memory of all those games? i hope that made sense HAHA.
thanks again :D
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