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.
Posts
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.
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/
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.
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