Smoking Blinds Your Wii?

Not only is smoking very bad for you, it’s bad for your Wii too. So says the Boston Harold on the heels of the issues with Super Smash Bros Brawl. SSBB is the biggest Wii game to date and thus requires a dual layer disc. The problem is that if the lens gets contaminated with dirt and dust, the Wii has trouble reading it. The Wii uses special “Wii Optical Discs”, which have the same capacity as a DVD. The only difference is that the discs are watermarked with a special barcode, presumably to keep the format proprietary.

Can second hand smoke really damage your Wii? What a stupid question. The residue of the smoke and tar gets sucked into the console and gums up the lens. Smoking around electronics is generally not a good idea. In fact, smoking period is not a good idea but some people insist on doing it, so just keep it away from your games. Nintendo has advised against using commercial lens cleaning kits and has told people that are receiving the read error to send the console to them. The service is free of charge regardless of warranty status. Some have taken matters into their own hands and reports that blowing compressed air into the slot will work. It’s a good idea to try and keep all electronics dust and dirt free since they can blind optical drives, block fan intakes, and act like an insulator around heatsinks causing overheating.

For those old enough to remember, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) way back in the late 80s had a similar issue with dust on the cartridge slot causing read errors. Nintendo released the NES cleaning kit. The problem was only with the original toaster style NES, not the top loading NES 2.

Source: Daily Tech