PSP: A Facial Reconstruction

Last year, an unfortunate accident had left my PlayStation Portable with a scarred face. With the addition of the 100th title for the PSP, at first, I thought of upgrading my launch system to the PSP 3000 model. But then I started looking for other alternatives aside from sending it back to Sony to be fixed. I was able to find a cheap solution: a faceplate replacement I found on Amazon. Uncertain about the result, I still decided to try it out and thus the PSP surgery commences:

Before: Three deep scratches on the top right hand side of the screen.

The new faceplate.

In surgery: Don't worry, the PSP was in deep anesthesia.

After: No more distracting scratches obscuring my view. Hurray!

The new faceplate was very easy to install though there were some tricky parts to it like transferring the buttons underneath the screen that actually laid out as a long strip behind the faceplate. There were only a total of six small screws that had to be removed and resecured and while the PSP was "naked", I took the opportunity to blow off a small amount of dust that had settled on top of the actual LCD using an air duster. I am happy to see the result but things didn't end up as perfectly as I would like it to be. The last screw couldn't tighten the top right hand corner of the handheld completely, which may have been caused by a slight misalignment of the screw hole. I can't fix it now because for some reason, the head of the screw got completely busted when I tried to unscrew it even though I was using a properly-sized screwdriver to do the job. The screw must not have been sturdy enough since it was rather small. I may have to find some time to meddle with it in the future but for now, screw it! My PSP now looks pretty again and that should count for something.