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Thomas Harte

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Nov 30, 2005
400
4
I have a 667Mhz Powerbook without DVI connector. The touchpad has long had issues of suddenly ceasing to work, which I gather is relatively common due to issues with internal grounding and/or insulation. I actually know more or less nothing about electronics, so please excuse my vagueness on the issue. I'm not a big fan of touchpads anyway (especially when they only have a single button and I can't change which one it is without paying), so this never bothered me.

So, I have happily been using a USB mouse. For the last few months the computer has developed a fun game where every so often it instaneously "forgets" about the plugged in mouse and subsequently ignores it. It would still be listed in the System Profiler as attached, and was obviously still getting power (as an optical mouse, the little red LED on the bottom would keep lighting up) but the machine would ignore it. Unplugging it and plugging it back in would fix the problem. At first this would happen maybe once every few days. Lately it had been as often as once or twice a day.

I don't have anything I can plug into the various other ports on the back (ethernet, firewire, modem, etc), so I'm not sure if this is a "back panel" or a USB specific problem.

Then on Thursday the machine decided it wasn't interested in recognising anything plugged into USB. My mouse gets power but doesn't otherwise do anything. Ditto for my iPod.

All this time, the bluetooth adapter I had plugged into the PCMCIA slot continued working (via Card Blues Suite). But if I plug in a USB PCMCIA card then my machine ignores that as well. So frustratingly I can no longer use USB peripherals.

This problem shows itself in OS X v10.4.5 and in the boot folder selection screen that you get if you hold down option while booting, so I am quite sure it is a hardware issue.

I'm on a severe budget at the minute, so a new machine is not a realistic prospect for the foreseeable problem. Will Apple still service machines like mine (from 2001), or is there perhaps some software fix I can apply to work around the problem? It seems very strange to me that my USB PCMCIA card gets ignored while my bluetooth card works fine.
 

California

macrumors 68040
Aug 21, 2004
3,885
90
Thomas Harte said:
I have a 667Mhz Powerbook without DVI connector. The touchpad has long had issues of suddenly ceasing to work, which I gather is relatively common due to issues with internal grounding and/or insulation.
I'm on a severe budget at the minute.

I happen to have a working trackpad from a DVI tibook. The case was bent and I stripped it of all working parts, including the trackpad. It is just taped onto the underside of your topcase. Five bucks! Don't know what to say about the usb thing but it I think Tibooks were usb 1.0, not 2.0; that could be the problem.
 
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