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Help with old Compaq presario 2100 [SOLVED]

amateurhouramateurhour One day I'll be professionalhourThe woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered User regular
edited May 2008 in Help / Advice Forum
So I posted this in stupid technology subforum, but I didn't get any answers, I figured more people might check H/A. If nothing pops up within a day or hell, even by lunch tomorrow mods feel free to lock.

So a friend of mine gave me a free laptop, which is awesome. It's the Presario 2100 from a couple years back.

It's got an AMD Athlon XP mobile processor (2.16 ghz), 704 megs of ram, ATI graphics, and is overall a pretty good system. He said the only problem was that the pci card slot and usb drives won't work. I haven't tried the pcmia slot yet, but the USB port does nothing when I plug something in.

Thing is though, they're both registered as working properly in hardware settings, so I know they're at least still connected to the motherboard and registering.

My questions are:

1) Any way to fix the usb port issue? I've got XP pro installed with all the latest updates, and what I think are the latest updates for the laptop hardware.

2) If not, where is a reputable place to buy motherboards online? They're too expensive through compaq, and I've gotten bad reviews about the ebay sellers through compaq support forums. (I checked the support forums for USB help, but to no avail)

If I can't get it working, and the motherboard is too expensive, I'm going to gut the screen for another project and just use it as a firewall/file server. Just hoping I could get it working first.

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amateurhour on

Posts

  • bowenbowen How you doin'? Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    In all honesty, it probably won't be worth the time and effort to replace or diagnose the situation. I dropped my laptop a few years back ($600, warrenty had expired) and the PCMCIA slot stopped functioning. Windows still reported it was working (the bus was still intact obviously). After I opened it I found that the connection piece had completely broken off.

    To replace it would've been $400 out of pocket, and I might as well have just bought a new laptop. Laptop components are notoriously overpriced and labor intensive to replace and diagnose. Even troubleshooting yourself. Although the USB situation could be as simple as a loose connector inside the case, the PCMCIA slot is a different beast entirely that uses raised connectors attached directly to the board.

    In summation, get a new laptop if you want a laptop that works, use this for whatever mundane use you can find.

    bowen on
    not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
  • DrFrylockDrFrylock Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    One thing you can do is try to figure out if it's a hardware or software problem. Boot off of a Knoppix LiveCD and plug in a USB flash drive and see if Knoppix recognizes it. If it does, you've likely got a Windows problem. If it doesn't, it's probably a hardware issue.

    DrFrylock on
  • amateurhouramateurhour One day I'll be professionalhour The woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered User regular
    edited April 2008
    DrFrylock wrote: »
    One thing you can do is try to figure out if it's a hardware or software problem. Boot off of a Knoppix LiveCD and plug in a USB flash drive and see if Knoppix recognizes it. If it does, you've likely got a Windows problem. If it doesn't, it's probably a hardware issue.

    Can you toss me a link to a source to burn a live cd? Every time I try to find a live cd for a linux flavor I have to navigate through forty thousand pages of shit.

    I'll take it apart tonight to see if it's just the connectors. That's the one thing I haven't done. If I can just get USB or PCMCIA working again then it's perfect.

    amateurhour on
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  • bowenbowen How you doin'? Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    DrFrylock wrote: »
    One thing you can do is try to figure out if it's a hardware or software problem. Boot off of a Knoppix LiveCD and plug in a USB flash drive and see if Knoppix recognizes it. If it does, you've likely got a Windows problem. If it doesn't, it's probably a hardware issue.

    Can you toss me a link to a source to burn a live cd? Every time I try to find a live cd for a linux flavor I have to navigate through forty thousand pages of shit.

    I'll take it apart tonight to see if it's just the connectors. That's the one thing I haven't done. If I can just get USB or PCMCIA working again then it's perfect.

    I've always been partial to ubuntu, and the actual desktop CD doubles as a live CD until you perform an install:

    http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download/

    or Knoppix:

    http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-mirrors/download.php?lang=en&link=ftp://csociety-ftp.ecn.purdue.edu/pub/knoppix/

    bowen on
    not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
  • corcorigancorcorigan Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    Most the laptop connections will be built directly into the logicboard, so if they're broken you'll probably need to basically replace the whole thing. Which means you might as well get a new laptop. Or play silly buggers with a soldering iron.

    corcorigan on
    Ad Astra Per Aspera
  • amateurhouramateurhour One day I'll be professionalhour The woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered User regular
    edited April 2008
    corcorigan wrote: »
    Most the laptop connections will be built directly into the logicboard, so if they're broken you'll probably need to basically replace the whole thing. Which means you might as well get a new laptop. Or play silly buggers with a soldering iron.

    I've got no problems breaking out the soldering iron, I just won't pay $300 to replace the board. It's still fast enough to do everything I need and more, but if I can't get USB or the card slots working it's a brick, because all it can do is get online with cat 5 and burn to CD.

    amateurhour on
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  • nerdgaymernerdgaymer Registered User regular
    edited May 2008
    bit of a long shot, but you can try uninstalling and reinstalling or rolling back the usb drivers to see if that helps. if it doesnt there is no big loss as it isnt working in the first place. set a restore point before you do this though.

    nerdgaymer on
  • amateurhouramateurhour One day I'll be professionalhour The woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered User regular
    edited May 2008
    I've already completely wiped the software and drivers and reinstalled them.

    I'm an IT tech, so the software side of things was checked thoroughly, I just don't know a lot when it comes to soldering laptop parts.

    UPADTE:

    I finally opened the thing up last night, and the PCMCIA slot was screwed. It was all bowed up in the middle where someone had forced a card or dropped it with a card in it possibly. The USB port failed due to the top port being busted. Either a) it's not giving a good power connection anymore (usb 1.1) or b) it's reading the top port as busted and just skipping the botton one. Either way, the laptop is fried.

    I salvaged 768 megs of laptop ram, a 40 gig hdd, the cd-rw/dvd rom, and a few other parts out of it and junked the rest.

    I then stripped the monitor, which I will either build into a digital photo frame or a homemade digital theatre projector.

    Either way, case closed. Lock away

    amateurhour on
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