Dell Inspiron 3700 pointing devices not working.....

[DaPurpleRT]

Alright guys,

I got this laptop for a great deal and really want to fix the only thing keeping my from using it.... neither of the built in touchpad or pointing stick or 4 buttons work. I installed the Dell Alps touch pad drivers as well, no good. Formatted the hd, reinstalled windows and then the drivers, still nothing....

So Itried the Dell Diagnostics disk and it gets an error (doesn't tell em what it is) when I try to test the pointing devices.

I tried hooking in a PS/2 mouse, wouldn't work, so I restarted with it in, no good. How could the PS/2 port and built in devices not work???

My only other option is trying a USB mouse.

Any ideas on what's going wrong? Id it is bad hardware. how coincidental would it have to be that the PS/2 port is bad too? Maybe something to do with IRQ in bios or something?

Oh yeah, I did go into Bios and make sure it had the pointing device set to Touchpad/PS/2.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance!

--Ryan

 

[DaPurpleRT]

Any ideas?

 

[endersftd]

Looks like you covered the main bases - Drivers, Re-installing, BIOS.

I would be curious if a USB connected device works, since that should be on a complete different system than the PS/2. However, after all the troubleshooting you already did, it could be a hardware-related problem, but to take out the pointing devices AND the PS/2, that sounds like a component on the system board fried, which wouldn't be worth trying to get repaired.

I suppose you've checked Dell's support site for any useful tips. If you want to take a peek at the hardware inside your laptop, they MIGHT have schematics and a prodecure to safely take off the keyboard, etc. I'm not sure what that will accomplish, though.