red Wii mini review

our old "classic" Wii seems to have a lot of trouble reading disks;  Thought it was just scratches

Finally a brand new game disk failed to read (a holiday gift)

so went out and picked up the "only in Canada" red Wii mini.

Comments:

• reads old "bad disks" just fine.  Mostly the Lego {x} series were problematic on our older "regular" Wii
• do miss the SD card for looking at pictures ;
• do not mind the missing WiFi ;  Could try a usb network port, but have not yet.
• we never used the wireless connection to our DSi
• odd red colour does make it look a bit out of place, sitting next to the TV
• electronic store's 30 day return policy made it low risk

theory:

the older Wii 's DVD drive mechanism appears to be failing:

guesses:

• spinning speed
• led power
• head alignment
• phase of the moon?

Could have tried to break open the case and manually replace, but the red mini was inexpensive enough to spend the time playing the games, rather than soldering ;)

now that we have a second Wii... looking at the homebrew channel for the older one...