Recently I ordered a Japanese Midnight Blue SCPH-50000 PS2 from Japan and it finally came in. While I was quick to admire it, it didn't come without its issues.

After swapping the power supply for a north American one and cleaning the console, everything seemed to work fine. It even came with a Japanese copy of Battlefield 2 in the disc drive. I went and MechaPwn'd it and all was well. Well that is until it would refuse to run some games and boot me back to the browser screen. The game would try and load, and then fail over and over again, all the while never showing me an error screen. I found this quite odd, but knew the laser worked somewhat due to it occasionally booting up the games. Googling this issue led me to a Reddit post describing a similar issue. One of the comments said that it was the laser on its way out. After reading that, I figured I'd open the console again and see what kind of laser it was. To my surprise and horror, it was a pvr-702w which seem to be almost impossible to find, and can't be replaced by a more easily found KHS-400C laser. This led to a short search on the internet where a suitable replacement laser was found on eBay. The price wasn't cheap, but it should do the trick. I just need to wait for it to come in now.