Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

As my 11 year old son came in the living room a week ago, face falling to the floor, he declares that the Wii is "broken". He just received a new game for Christmas and has been playing it happily since. I am usually pretty good at troubleshooting things so after a few mintues I see that it's a disc read error. The Wii is not reading any of our discs. Fortunately, with some patience I can get the Wii to recognize the disc after inserting and ejecting it multiple times, but obviously, this will not do. ( Eleven year olds do not have the patience to perform this action as needed, and I don't have the time to do this on a regular basis) On Nintendo's site they offer up the advice of cleaning the lens on the Wii before offering to generously set up a pick up to fix your Wii for a small fortune (that as a single mom I can't fork out). In Nintendo's style they say that the only lens cleaning kit you can use is the one they make because, like all other products that are not Nintendo, they will ruin the Wii, destroy your lawn, and end the world (I have an Energizer Wii remote charger that works....please don't tell them). However, in this case....They are correct. And don't let anyone tell you different. I thought that like any other lens on any other machine you should be able to just clean it. So did the folks at 3 of the stores I went to that did not carry the Nintendo Lens Cleaning Kit. Use anything they said. You can't. Leave it to Nintendo to come up with something so bizarre looking that no one on the planet would even bother duplicating it for bootleg purposes. Fortunately, it's cheap. AND IT WORKS!!! It's weird to use. And I really thought it was going to be some gimmick before I shipped off the hard drive, but behold.......The discs are being read, the boy is happy, and Mom is free to write this review and get laundry done and complain that he's playing Nintendo too much. It is probably not the fix for every disc read error that comes over a Wii players screen, but it DEFINITELY worth trying before you ship the Wii out for repairs. Gunk does build up in there (No smoking in the house but we do have one dog)....and with more then one cleaning pad, you get many passes at fixing the issue. And it makes you a superhero, if for that one moment before your child's eyes glaze over to the next Wii game.