I realised after I twittered about my Wii that I haven't really mentioned anything about my Wii. I sent it to a technician - who promptly told me some nonsense thing about how I needed to replace the whole drive, and gave me a reason completely unrelated to the real reason the drive had failed - a broken gear.
I know it was a broken gear - because I checked it before I sent it in to be repaired.
He then told me that it would cost AUD250 to replace the drive. Right. It would cost me more than half my Wii to replace the drive. This repair I obviously refused. A complete drive replacement wasn't something I needed a technician for.
And so, I bought a replacement drive for about AUD80, replaced it myself, and the Wii started working again. The catch? The laser on the replacement drive was worse than the one on my original drive.
And so, yet again, recently, I had to exchange the lasers since the one I was currently using, started giving me plenty of disc read errors. (And before people start accusing me of piracy, this was on a perfectly genuine Wii Fit disc.)
I adjusted the POT on the laser, and after a few more times messing with it, I decided the best course of action was indeed to just replace the laser with the one from my old broken gear drive.
And so my Wii is working again! Nintendo either really messed up the QC this round, or something else went wrong. It's my least used console - and it's given me the most problems. One wonders if it'll die way before my other two consoles.