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5414
October 16th, 2009 08:00
Trackpad and Pointing Stick Not Functioning
I replaced the bottom case assembly on my Dell Latitude D630 last night. After I took 50 screws out and only put 49 back in (no matter how careful I am, this always happens), I fired it up and got an error message saying something about the BIOS. (I think I unplugged the BIOS battery from the motherboard. The system date and time were off - it had reset to July 23, 2007) But after looking around in the BIOS settings, it looked like everything was recognized (memory, hdd, processor, etc.), so I tried again and XP started up fine. I think I might have had mouse movement for a fraction of a second after XP loaded, because the pointer was not dead center, but after that there was nothing from the trackpad or the blue pointing stick. It is possible that I imagined the initial movement though.
I plugged in a USB mouse and looked around in the mouse settings and it looked like XP didn't even recognize that it was a laptop. There were no trackpad settings to try and adjust. I searched the internet and found a driver, installed it, and restarted and nothing. Searched and found a different one, installed and restarted and still nothing. Everything else is working just fine. Everything on the keyboard is working fine. I took the keyboard off again and unplugged the keyboard from the motherboard and tried to find if I missed a connection, but the pointing stick cable is connected to the keyboard cable, right? I'm not sure about the trackpad though.
This is not the OEM version of XP I am working with. I received this laptop secondhand and installed a generic version of XP some time ago. But it was working just fine until I unplugged everything and plugged it all back in. So I am wondering if there is some connection that I am missing, or if there is some specific driver I should use, or some way to get XP to recognize that hardware. Also, wondering if maybe just reinstalling XP all together would get it working.
I was just so proud of myself for taking the darn thing completely apart and rebuilding it (my first such experience with a laptop) and this trackpad thing is just ruining all my good vibes. Any and all help is greatly appreciated.


kingospin
2 Posts
0
October 16th, 2009 19:00
Nevermind. I guess it must have been a loose cable. After a reboot it started functioning again for a brief time. So I took it apart again and checked everything out and now it is back to normal. Hopefully it will continue.