T400 USB ports

I guess my option is down to getting a USB PCMCIA Card. Do you know any card that will work nicely with the T400?

 

Recently the 2 usb ports on the left side of my T400 failed as well. The quality of the plastic apparently wasn't too good, the black pieces fell out after a little rough handling. Nothing out of the ordinary though, certainly nothing severe enough to break a normal usb port, let alone a ThinkPad one.

I managed to solder the old connector from the system board, hoping to be able to find a replacement online, but to no avail. Does anyone know whether I will be able to find such a part online? It's a Foxconn piece, it says 925YA on top, but Google has no hits. The closest foxconn match I found is UB9112C-S01-AF, but it is slightly different.

 

I think your best bet would be to find a "for parts or repair" T400 mainboard on Ebay, desolder its ports, and solder them to your current system.

 

it is almost impossible to find these usb ports as spare parts, as said try to get a second hand board and get the usb port from that.

Alternatively get a pcmcia or expresscard usb card, this will be the cheapest way of adding more usb ports at minimum price.

These usb ports break quite frequently on this series of thinkpad, i have seen numerous early build T400, T500, W500, R400, R500, W500 all having the exact same problem.

 

Thanks LoneWolf15 & lead_org. I will try ebay for some time, but I'll probably buy a usb3.0 express card soon. Are these parts custom made for Lenovo? Seems rather strange that they are unavailable on the web.

 

since very few people have really done a straight usb ports swap on these machines, it is hard to say whether these parts are custom made or not. But most likely it is not a custom made usb port, but you would have to look around to find the right one, since there is very little public information on these sort of stuff.

The best beat and cheapest fix is to just get a expresscard usb expansion card.

 

so if i have a newer W500 (got it from lenovo outlet last october, new) it probably wouldn't have this problem?

 

I have a friend with a t500 witj the same prob. My t500 hasnt had any problems with the usb jack yet. May you guys are a bit too rough with it?
If it was my unit, i would just get a usb 3.0express card slot like many have mentioned already.

 

I haven't seen any T400/T500s with this problem, and I haven't had the issue with my T500, but I can definitely see it as a possibility. The plastic wedge in the USB sockets seem to be pretty low-grade and brittle plastic.

 

maybe not enough plasticiser was added to the plastic, which may make it brittle.

I haven't really seen many recent machines having this problem, but that doesn't mean it is not going to happen to these machines.