Most of the people who I had to repair stuff for usually bring me their gear when it's about to die.In this case my mom's friend Lisa brought to me again her Dell Inspiration 500M laptop.
This problem with the sucker is that the keyboard is screwed. Now that wouldn't be a problem you say as we can just stick in a keyboard into the USB port. Well her brother, who was the previous owner, mangled both ports to the point that both are missing the plastic piece that the USB connectors sit on. And one port is missing a pin all together!
Naturally, she was using an USB PCMCIA card for the keyboard but on boot you can't use the keyboard until windows loaded. Which was the problem. Her XP bit it too. So I thought I just desolder those dead USB ports and solder in some used ones from my spare motherboards. After 20 screws later I decided I didn't want to strip the Dell Laptop just to solder in the USB ports since I most likely will spend another 2 hours more trying to screw the 60 screws back (well I don't know how many but it's a hell lot).
So I thought, "Why not just solder a USB cable to the pins?" So I bought a cable, stripped. Double checked
pinoutsand soldered the wires to the pins. After a quick test and some insulation I hot glued the port for protection and strength. Here is the finished work.
2 comments:
NIce Fix. I had to do a similar mod to my cousins laptop.
And it is a lot of screws, :-p
Thanks, Dell in those days are crazy... but I figure they discovered it was more a hassle to their tech to unscrew all that crap than it was to the average modder :P
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