Power Surge

[Verph]

okay, so here's the story..

this happened a few weeks ago with my dad's laptop (a dell). he logged in one day and it just came up with an error saying that there's a power surge on the USB hub port. so his little pen drive couldn't work anymore.

i never really encountered such a thing before. i worked on it for endless hours to no avail. i don't know what happened with it. i reinstalled everything and i got the same error. it only goes away when i disable the hub port totally (duh). i sent it to a few technicians around here and all they all said the same thing. actually one of them said nothing. he looked at me and game me this look saying "sorry dude, i'm too dumb to figure it out." others said it can't be fixed yada yada yada.

next thing i did was look up on the net. i didn't find anything that could help me or make anything clear.. then i remembered these forums (from the xtremevbtalk forums.. i used to be a daily regular member there.. now i'm a lot busy with school). i searched and got here.

basically if anyone knows anything about anything like this whatsoever please tell me. i just need something clear.

thanks.

[O~Snapple]

Ok its funny you posted this, I ran into the same problem two days ago with my Office computer heres my story.

I was using the 2 front usb ports on the tower and one of the cords snagged and broke the plastic peice between the 2 USB ports.

I havent fixed it yet because i havent had time, but the actual problem is this...

The plastic peice seperates the connectors from each USB when the plastic broke there was nothing seperating the connection between the two therefore when i plugged in a device to one of them the side was touching the other USB port creating a "Power Surge" Also know as a Short Circut.

What i would do is see if there is a replacment part to seperate the USB ports. and if not you might have to use other ports. Also i would try checking the USB casing inside if the USB ports you are talking about are in teh back of the computer.

~Snapple

[Verph]

what a coincedence eh?

well i'm not really sure who did what or what happened, because i only got to see it later on... now the problem with this laptop is that it's only got 1 usb port. only one. AND it's built into the motherboard, so i can't replace it if i ever had to. it all looks fine to me from the outside, though maybe there's something on the inside that's causing the short circuit.

ahh my dad's going to freak out when i take that thing apart -_-