Help! Laptop no longer recognizes anything placed into the PCMCIA slot!

[guyver01]

I have a compaq presario 1200XL-111 laptop...
it WAS working the other day...

now whenever i insert any card into the pcmcia slot.... nothing happens... it' almost as if the pcmcia slot is dead.

is there any way to fix these? my laptop is "out of warranty" so i'm thinking about taking it to a 3rd party compaq repair shop....
but can i fix it myself somehow?

is it even fixable?

thanks!

 

[MacaroneePenguin]

What have you done to your laptop (i.e. install/uninstall program, drivers, etc) just before it started not working on you?
What's the Operating System?

 

[jschuk]

Generally a bad PCMCIA slot means a new system board as the actual slot rarely goes bad. Just looked at the parts breakdown and there is no option to order the PCMCIA slot even if that was the faulty part. I think it sucks that a lot of the Presarios only have one PCMCIA slot, same for HP Pavillion laptops.

 

[gritnugget]

my guess would be card services

 

[c0rv1d43]

Which operating system is this notebook running? Reason I ask is that some Win9x had to have 32-bit PC Card support turned on (during installation or from a Control Panel applet). If it got hosed / corrupted, the system wouldn't see any card you placed in the slot. If this is Windows what does the Device Manager have to say about the PC Card slots?

- Collin

 

[guyver01]

Was running WinXP... formatted and did a fresh restore just incase i messed something up..

now running Win98-SE.... Device mananger shows PC Card services installed... i removed it and rebooted, and it redetected no problem..
but whenever i pop in a PCMCIA card... no dice

 

[c0rv1d43]

Uh-oh. Beginning to sound like a bummer. The cards that you can't get detected in this system work in other systems?

- Collin

 

[guyver01]

<< Uh-oh. Beginning to sound like a bummer. The cards that you can't get detected in this system work in other systems? >>



Yup... that's why i'm betting on a bad PCMCIA slot.

I contacted Compaq on this... and they told me if i sent it in for them to repair, they would have to replace the entire motherboard :Q
Now this is getting too expensive.

 

[c0rv1d43]

Ya, integration on these systems usually results in the need to replace the MB for a great many different issues. I always suggest just leaving PC Cards in the slots instead of ejecting them and reinserting them all of the time. But some people have to swap cards on a regular basis so they're just naturally going to wear the slots out. They're pretty darned fragile. I've seen one thumb-fingered person kill two slots in quick succession trying to insert a card that had a connector that was just a little out-of-kilter.

Against all odds I'll keep hoping that you find a cheaper fix.

- Collin