4 pin 1394 firewire mouse?!

[Mulvaney]

Hi everyone.

 

I'm trying to help a member of my family who is clearly quite careless fix their laptop (again). First the mouse pad died, then the three USB ports went (one by one), then the first PCMCIA USB card died, now the PCMCIA socket seems to be dead.

 

All that's left is 4 pin 1394 firewire.

 

Is there any way of plugging a mouse in to that socket? I don't know if it's possible to convert firewire to USB for that purpose. It doesn't look like it from what I've read so far.

 

He's not a techie, so I think he'd go mad trying to replace the mouse with the numeric keyboard on the laptop, which also shares some of the letter keys, so he'd have to switch between typing and mousing.

 

There's a touchpad app for the iPhone, which would work at home on his wifi, but it would be fiddly to use instead of a laptop touchpad.

 

There's no bluetooth built in, only WIFI. There's a network port, but I wouldn't imagine that you can get a mouse for that.

 

Other than that there's only VGA, S-Video, a modem port and an internal IDE CDROM connector (I've got an IDE to SATA tray in mine, so that I can use an SSD for the boot drive and a 1TB SATA for the data drive, instead of a CDROM.)

 

A shame to waste a perfectly good laptop because he can't use a mouse on it... perhaps I'll put a non-mouse O/S on it when he finally gives up on it and buys a new laptop (which he'll probably break).

[Arthur]

There's no bluetooth built in, only Wi-Fi.

I think a WiFi mouse or USB server will be your only options (short of getting the USB ports repaired).

 

• www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0054QK780
  
• store.raspberrypi.com/projects/virtualhere (+ Raspberry Pi)
  

when he finally gives up on it and buys a new laptop (which he'll probably break).

Perhaps he would be better off with something that isn't a laptop next time?

Edited March 23, 2014 by Arthur