# Can fried USB ports be repaired?



## tinknal

We got nailed by lightning a month or so ago. It destroyed the modem (and my electric fencer), and the USB ports on the computer. It is a lap top. The computer works fine but we cannot hook up anything to it. No mouse, printer, etc. The scroll pad works so we can still move the cursor, but it would sure be nice to have the mouse back.


----------



## Windy in Kansas

I had my computer open this week. They are remove and replace units. The front ones and back ones are different on my HP. Front connect via cable while the rear ones plug into the mother board and look like small boxes rather than like a plug in modem.


----------



## 6e

From what I've seen they're connected directly into the motherboard in one way or another and would be hard to replace. There is a card though that you can plug in that will add more USB ports. You might try one of those.


----------



## 6e

You might google your make and model of laptop and replacing USB ports. Good luck.


----------



## Kari

tinknal said:


> We got nailed by lightning a month or so ago. It destroyed the modem (and my electric fencer), and the USB ports on the computer. It is a lap top. The computer works fine but we cannot hook up anything to it. No mouse, printer, etc. The scroll pad works so we can still move the cursor, but it would sure be nice to have the mouse back.


Are you actually sure the USB ports are fried and not disabled in the BIOS? When the pc first powers on, you are prompted to press F1 or F2 etc to access the BIOS. In the BIOS settings...usually the advanced settings, there may be an option to enable/disable USB. It is worth your while to check this...

Many times, USB ports are soldered directly to the laptop motherboard and probably would cost more to replace then having the entire motherboard swapped out.


----------



## Nature_Lover

If all your ports are affected, sometimes this can be caused by corrupted drivers for your USB host controller, have you tried disabling and then reenabling the drivers for your controller?
See if you are using drivers that came with the operating system, (in my case, those driver files are signed by microsoft, not my motherboard manufacturer) if so, you might be able to repair them by using the system file checker utility to replace them with protected cached files. Make sure you use the scanonce command to scan at next boot before the drivers are loaded. Let me know if you want help with this. 
I realize this is probably a hardware problem, but if I were you, I'd try everything I could to try and repair it, before opening the box and replacing the physical ports, and then finding out it was a software issue.


----------



## sticky_burr

if you cant do it your self its probably cheaper to replace it .. sad but true
i assume its older and a new comparable (not top of the line) computer is probally 200-300 it will be atleast 150 ++++ to replace the board if you can do with out (unplug) that port/ports then all is well


----------



## Kung

What Kari said. You can try everything you want first...but if they ARE bad then it'll definitely be cheaper to replace the motherboard. Post the make and model and we can tell you how much it'd run ya.


----------

