[20cobra01]

Just to add a little follow up. I have been going through a lot of the post and stickies on this forum and learning alot from what others have posted in the past, there is a great wealth of knowlege on this forum. In my research one thing that concerns me is that I have been seeing post about the v4 and earlier consoles having crappy lasers, and it was a problem that was causing me headaches with my install. Since I have swabbed the laser down with the alchole soaked que tip (probably not the most recommend way of cleaning a laser but hey I was desparate at the time), I have been able to bypass the browser screen and succesfully boot all of my originalls and backups. I am starting to become concerned that my laser may be a ticking disaster waiting to happen, I have changed to the Taiyo Yuden TYG01 media since it was recommended as a less laser intensive media. My questions is, just how bad are the V4 lasers, should I be worried about mine going out since I had this intial problem of the console going to the browser screen before reading original PS2 games. What are some tell tell signs that a laser is about to go out, -game skipping / freezing / taking progressivly longer to load between levels. Right now I seem to be having no real problems as I am no longer seeing the browser screen during boot ups and I have put my ear to the console while booting orignal games and backups and it does appear to be making any sounds like the laser is having any difficulty booting backups vs originals. My best bet is probably to just keep gaming until I do see problems with my back-up / original not playing. Are lasers hard to replace, I have found a website that sell the laser for about $65 but I think I saw a post where it is easy to blow the new laser if you don't do some type of calibrations before powering up the console but I am not sure if this may have been console specif and maybe not the issue with replacing a V4 laser. Thanks for any insight, and sorry for the long winded post.