Sorry for thread grave digging
My PS2 is a fat V9 SCPH-50004 from 2003-something. The uncle of a friend of mine bought it for a trip, and afterwards he gave it to my bud. He played it until early 2009 when his young brother smashed it with a toy rubber hammer

He had somebody take a look at it and that somebody came to the conclusion that the laser is wrecked. Then it collected dust in his place until 2010, when I read about FreeMcBoot and the possibility to play games from USB hard drives / sticks or via the network adapter. I wanted to try it out since I had another bud who was able to install FMCB to my memcard, and so I bought it off him for 15.
The whole FMCB thing worked really well (except for the lagging cutscenes due to USB 1.1) and I played a fair share of games including GT4. Last summer though I decided to have a look at the laser to see if there's anything I could do about it. So I grabbed a screwdriver and opened the Lady up, just to see that the laser was in perfect condition. The real problem was that it did not move. I tried to slide it back and forth but it wasn't really working. I almost gave up on it...
... and then it happened: I wanted to stand up from my chair and accidentally dropped the screwdriver onto the lens rails. There was a loud clicking noise and I went "Oh 🤬, now I really wrecked it". But to my surprise the laser was moving again, not perfectly as the grease applied to the rails was dry due to the long idle time, but I fixed that by reapplying some more grease. So the problem was the rails, they were stuck in some awkward position since that hit with the toy rubber hammer and they just needed a little force from above.
I did some readjusting work and now it reads DVDs, CDs, everything perfectly. Even burnt Dual Layers are no problem, which surprises me because it's an old HD7 laser, one of the worse PS2 lasers.
I do have the feeling though that the laser might die on me soon because of the declining state of my DVD-R copies. That's why I'm starting to dig up and buy the classics and rarities, but as the name implies the rarities are pretty hard to find.
Just yesterday I got my hands on a copy of "Shin Megami Tensei: Lucifer's Call" (or "Nocturne" in NTSC regions) for just 20, which in my eyes is a great deal for such a niche game that's mostly out of print nowadays. (btw: I recommend this game, should you be able to find it, to people who like JRPGs and aren't afraid of high difficulties and dark, adult storylines involving demons, occult and stuff. This game is damn hard at some points, but also very very entertaining.)
So, that pretty much sums up my whole PS2 history. 👍
See you around,
theRealMeyer
P.S.: I highly recommend FMCB to everybody in possession of a PS2. If your laser dies on you some day and you have a functioning DVD drive in your PC and some hard drive space / an external HDD as well as a network adapter in your PS2 (preinstalled in all slims), you can just rip all your games as ISOs, create a SMB share and let your PS2 access it via the app "OpenPS2Loader". Gigabit LAN is recommended, though, to achieve full speed and improve loading times. Or alternatively just buy a large IDE-HDD and install it if you have a fat PS2 and copy your games on that one. You can do this via the Network Adapter too if your laser's already given up. So check it out! You need somebody else with a chipped or FMCBed PS2, though, because you need to install it on your memory card.