USB ports losing power on aspire 5315

about three weeks ago i noticed the two usb ports on the left side of my laptop were turning devices off intermittantly but i put this down to a problem with the device in question which is a mobile broadband dongle. i then looked into this further as i have tried the device on another pc and it works flawlessly.

i have found now that these two usb ports are almost dead in that they will power a mouse but if i plug in anything else like a usb memory stick or mobile phone or camera both ports just shut off. the odd thing is that they appear active in device manager and show no problems but the devices i have plugged in do not connect to the laptop at all. i have used a set of recovery disks to reset to factory default which did not help.

now the real problem i have found is that there is no recovery partition on my laptop and after ringing acer support they seem unwilling to help with diagnosing simply saying that as the recovery partition was gone the warranty was void and there would be a charge for any repair. what if there was no recovery partition to start with!

my laptop has not been tampered with as the acer support person stated but as far as i can see it never had a recovery partition or for some reason this partition has gone as i had to get the recovery disks off a friend who has the same laptop. i used to have two partitions on my hard disk Acer(C) and Data(D) but now i just have one 74.5GB hard disk.

has anyone got any ideas on what has gone wrong with my laptop or how to get the usb ports working as the partition is not a real problem except for Acer! the tech asked me to reset to factory settings using the recovery partition but i cant so that was the end of acer's support.

 

Not sure if this will help you, but I had a similar problem with my lappie a while ago. I fell down on my way from class to the bus stop, landed on my lappie, and almost smooshed it! When my USB failed, it turned out that the internal connections were slightly damaged and loose. I took the laptop to the local geek shop, and for less than $80 (USD), had fresh USB ports installed. Problem is gone. The head geek at the shop tells me that this also could have been wear and tear from conecting and disconectiog devices so much, and the little spill I took had been the final straw. If you're good at disassembling a lappie, you could see if anything has come loose.

 

i had the back cover off to see if there were any loose connections or if like with my pc the ports could be unplugged and reconnected to see if that would start them working but it looked too hard to get at them so i quickly replaced the cover

one thing i have just thought of is my mobile broadband dongle which i always kept plugged into one of the affected ports, this can sometimes run very hot and when signal is low it draws more power from the ports, could this have overcooked the ports?

 

you can replace the whole dc broad with the usb ports on that model you shound be able source online i think even got one kick around i order one for laptop then found i had one from anythey laptop we guted

 

@ Foggy lad: If you have other USB ports still working, you could try a portable USB hub to tide you over for a while. If your dongle is the trouble, then it might only eat the $20 hub instead. I usually use a hub to conect everyday stuff like printer, TV tuner, and keyboard so I only have to plug one thing in instead of 3.