Nooooo, my DS Lite!

[kyogres]

I was playing Fire Emblem on my DS Lite, and suddenly, the L button just quit responding. I can manage to make it work in about 1 out of 7 tries, but I have to mash it really hard. Hard enough to make my carpel tunnel issues flare up. (The button doesn't feel "stuck" or anything; it just doesn't respond.) I'm not sure why this happened. I try to

Comments

[okapifeathers]

i am pretty sure nintendo fixes systems for free and you only have to pay shipping from you to them.

[kyogres]

As of 4 years ago they didn't. My Wii technically didn't break, but the fan started running really loudly and I was worried that it was going to overheat. Nintendo charged me $80 to even look at it.

[antoj]

they don't, actually. my DSLite had a crack in the hinge and they quoted me $90 to fix it a few years ago.

[kyogres]

Yikes. Mine has a crack in the hinge too, though it doesn't seem to affect the gameplay.

For a price like that, I could just buy another DS Lite.

[antoj]

I've actually taken apart my DSLite before, when the hinge got cracked, because ninty wanted $90 for it (when the price of a brand new one was like $20 more at the time...)

the trigger buttons are held on with springs, it's possible one of the springs could have broken, but if you wanted to you could always open the system up and see if one of them just slipped off. just...do it carefully because those springs tend to launch themselves out of the system. ._.

[kyogres]

I read around a bit online, and my best guess is that dust or dirt somehow collected on the inside, since blowing into it temporarily fixed the problem.

I really hope it's not the spring. I am no good with electronics. I would probably break something if I took the DS apart.

I'm going to try blowing into it some more to see if I can get a longer-term fix. If that doesn't work, I may have a friend who could fix it. (I'm not sure if he works on handhelds, but he does work on larger electronics like Wiis and computers.)

[antoj]

It shouldn't be too hard to fix. :x the DS is actually not too difficult to take apart. If dirt did get inside, that'd make it even easier to fix.

It's probably something either clogging the spring (like dirt) or the spring itself. Hoping its just dirt though, because I'm not sure where you could get another spring for it. :s

That button is literally just a plastic thing with a thin wire spring wrapped around it, so there's not much that can go wrong there. Hopefully it's an easy fix.

[kyogres]

That's awesome, because I suck at finding fandoms. Seriously, where have you guys been hiding?