So a friend of mine gives me his old laptop (an old dell latitude) that is not booting. So i do my usual geek thing: grab out the hard drive, backup the data, format and get ready to re-install windows 95 (yeah i said it was an OLD laptop). Now everything was going along, slowly but it was doing its thing. Now once the pc was ready i boot it to windows the first time, try using the trackball, nothing happens. So I look through the system properties and see the mouse is marked as not working. I try everything i can think of (installing different drivers, checking the BIOS, etc) and still no luck. I even tried going to google but didn't have any luck there either.

So after days of going completely insane I happen to stumble across a secret menu hidden within the laptop (accessable by pressing something like Function + F2) which of course has an option to enable or disable the trackball (and all the power management features) now this solved my problem but brings to light the absolute stupidity of the person that designed this system, while it is nice to access these options while the computer is running, without knowing the menu is there (and with the lack of access to manuals and such due to it being a very old pc) you wouldn't have ever been able to get the trackball working. this is a menu that could have easily been added in the BIOS somewhere and saved me a bunch of hassle.


anyway i'm going to stop typing about it or i'll get even more annoyed and end up blowing up dell computers

Hehe, ah man, this makes me paranoid. My Dell laptop stopped booting last summer, and I kinda.. took out the HD, made it into an external one with my "USB-on-a-rope"... and shoved the laptop in my desk. I'm finally going to take it apart and see what the deal is, tomorrow (I've had a busy year XD; ). This post doesnt make me feel very optimistic XD;

Stupid laptops are such a pain to work on... I think I've been putting it off too long ^^;

Sounds much like the one I am typing this from now. I have a bit more space so I can run XP but there is always something wrong with this one. Worst of all though is my desktop computer though. At least you can do something about it... I don't know how to do those kind of things. Hope it all works out for you though in the end. Patience and Walmart might help. And if you start blowing up Dells, make sure you have someone there to tape the momentious occasion so you can watch it over and over for maximum enjoyment.

..figured out the problem on mine.. the monitor is a goner. I dont know if it's the LCD itself, or.. maybe a wire just broke somewhere in it.
I wonder how much it'll cost to get this fixed... XD;