For some time, the shoulder buttons on my DS have been acting up. In general, they tended not to respond consistently or would (individually) fail to respond at all. I ordered a tri-wing screwdriver a few weeks ago with the intent of taking apart the DS and cleaning the contacts on the shoulder buttons to improve behavior. The screwdriver arrived today and so I took apart my DS. It was relatively easy to pull most of it apart, though I didn't have an appropriately sized phillips-head screw driver for taking off the main board, I was able to fake it with a flat head screwdriver. Overall the operation was very successful. In addition to cleaning the shoulder contacts so that they worked as well as they ever have, I also cleaned off the interstitial space between the touchscreen and the lower LCD proper which had picked up a bit of dust that was annoying. I also seem to have inadvertently cleaned out the DS slot injection mechanism so that it seems to work better than it had previously. It hadn't been operating poorly before, but it now has regained the "multi-foot ejection" capability it had when it was new. I suspect that there had been build-up of dust on one side of ejection track that was acting as a cushion.

Overall, the only downside seems to be that I've lost all of my saved settings (due to pulling the batter). Mostly this is just the saved time and, but luckily it seems not to also include wireless networking settings. I'd say it is a small price to pay for returning functionality to a like-new state.

Published by XPost^GTK+