23rd June 2011, 2:08 PM
Be wary of that PS1. Later models have pretty stable drives that work fine, but the first model, the one you have, used plastic for the main railing instead of metal, which warped over time. Pretty much all the PS1 failures can be attributed to those first few models. By the 500x line, they'd changed the drive enough to eliminate that issue completely, so as long as they are well-kept, those ones should work well for some time to come. (Of course, down the years, all of them will eventually fail since all moving parts erode themselves eventually.)
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)