Bent

I used to have a career working with computers, the middle years of it spent troubleshooting.  A problem was a challenge, something I could never walk away from; it lead to hours and hours of research into all sorts of diverse areas which led to quite a successful position in a big company before I jacked it all in to be a teacher.

Well, tonight I had serious flashbacks to that period of my life.  There is a laptop at school on which the mouse never works, you have to hit a combination of keys to get it working (Fn+F9 if you're interested.  No?  Well you might be if you're still reading this far).  I formatted the system partition and installed Windows 10 - partly to solve the problem, partly to see the new version of Microshites operating system and mostly to have a spare grab-it-when-you-need-it machine in the staff room.  

However, when I started up the mouse still failed to work.

"Weird" my geek brain said to me.

I tried loads of stuff: drivers, BIOS updates, settings, etc, etc.  Looked at tons of forums, and apart from one guy with the same model of laptop with the same issues, I came up empty handed (he hadn't solved it either).

I stared at the bastard in a silent geeky fume and saw that one of the USB ports was broken.  I then remembered that a previous owner had been a bit heavy-handed with something or other and tried a bit too hard to fit something into it.....the lightbulb hit me.....I won't bore you with the details (it might detract from this otherwise fascinating post, but it does involve fooling as OS into thinking there's an external mouse plugged it.....yep, you knew it).......but I took some tweezers and straightened out the bent pins so they weren't making a contact.

Powered it up....mouse worked :-D 

There was three hours well spent, I'll sleep easy tonight.

Nerd.