[ruth s]

Am travelling in South America with my IBM Thinkpad X40 and one day the USB ports just stopped working. We re-installed the drivers and took it to some specialists, but we were told it was a hardware problem, and unfixable. We just found a USB HV-38 Travel Computer Cable in a store, which has 2 different connectors... one goes into the ethernet port and is labeled a RJ45. The other plus into the telephone port and is labelled a RJ11. Both have USB ports on the other side, that we have been attaching our flash drives and other devices to. HOWEVER, the computer is not recognising the cables, and after trawling the internet, I am no wiser. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get the ethernet port to recognise the adapter? I have checked the ethernet port is working, as when I plug a LAN cable in to connect to the internet, it is fine. Please help... we are desperate to have the use of our USB ports again

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Hi and welcome to Geeks to Go.

Please go to start...run... and type in devmgmt.msc. Then hit ok.
Look for any yellow ? or red !
Let us know if there are any.

What drivers did you re-install?
If you uninstall the drivers for the USB while in device manager, they will get re-installed when you reboot the computer. That is providing that the ports are not mechanically damaged.
What service pack are you running? If I recall properly, SP1 gives USB 1.1 and SP 2 will get you USB 2.0
How many USB ports do you have?
Have you tried all the ports? Because generally they are not all run from the same controller.

As for the cable, I am still looking up that one.

123runner

[123Runner]

Hi and welcome to Geeks to Go.

Please go to start...run... and type in devmgmt.msc. Then hit ok.
Look for any yellow ? or red !
Let us know if there are any.

What drivers did you re-install?
If you uninstall the drivers for the USB while in device manager, they will get re-installed when you reboot the computer. That is providing that the ports are not mechanically damaged.
What service pack are you running? If I recall properly, SP1 gives USB 1.1 and SP 2 will get you USB 2.0
How many USB ports do you have?
Have you tried all the ports? Because generally they are not all run from the same controller.

As for the cable, I am still looking up that one.

123runner

[ruth s]

Hello 123runner!

Thanks for your reply. Device Manager shows nothing wrong with the usb ports.... that is why everyone that has looked at it so far has come to the conclusion it is a mechanical error. The Thinkpad has 2 ports - one on each side of the laptop. On one side, it is completely dead. However, the other side does charge my iPhone, but the computer does not recognise that it (or any other device) is connected.

I have windows xp service pack 2 installed.

Thanks again for your help.... we have really given up on the fixing the usb ports, and that is why we got so excited about the ethernet/usb connectors... any luck on that one???

Cheers
Ruth S