I was recently given an old faulty HP pc that the mouse didn't on, the pointer just stayed in the middle of the screen.
I checked in the device manager and no pointing devices were shown. Did a search on the net and tried a few things but nothing worked.
I thought that maybe the mouse socket itself was faulty. The mouse and keyboard sockets come as one complete assembly. I had a few old motherboards lying around, checked and found the sockets all appear to be standard.
So out came the old soldering iron and I removed the "new" sockets from the donor board, easy enough. Then removed the faulty sockets, not so easy. I managed to pull off one of the solder pads along with some of the finest pcb tracks you have ever seen. Leaving a short strip of very fine track sticking up in the air. To make matters worse it was on top of the pcb under the socket assemly leading to a surface mounted ic, so no chance of soldering a link on, the pads on the ic are way to small.
Here is the socket assembly you can see the solder pad still attatched to one one the pins
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Soldered on the new sockets then took a small piece of wire from an old floppy drive ribbon cable and soldered it to the pin that had the solder pad missing threaded it through the board and very carefully soldered it the floating piece of track.
Then glued the wire to the case of the sockets to try and stop any strain on the joint.
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Must admit this is not the first time I have carried out a motherboard repair.
When I was swapping cpu's over once, I managed to bend a pin over and when I tried to straighten it off it broke.
So I soldered a flying lead onto the cpu from where the pin had broke off took it over the board and soldered it onto pin of the cpu socket. That actually worked as well.
I have photos of that as well if anyone wants to see.
