Ultranav not working. Help.

[Blender]

Hey y'all

This is a Z61p

I decided to upgrade the memory today to 4GB. I had to take the palm rest off in order to perform the upgrade. After the upgrade I boot up and login.

Now my tackpoint and touch pad is not working. I made sure all ribbon cables are snug and tight. The keyboard works normally.

This makes no sense. The trackpoint is connected with a different cable then the palm rest.

Any thoughts?

[brchan]

Adding ram should have no affect on the keyboard or touchpad. I would do another reseat of the cable connectors and make sure they are in the correct orientation. It may have been possible you damaged the ribbon cables, but that seems unlikely since both your keyboard and palmrest are having problems.

Out of curiosity, do things return to normal when you return to the original ram config?

[Blender]

Yeah. I could have damaged the pins in the cables. Those ribbon cables are very thin.

I plugged in the old mem modules and no change.

I think I might have damaged the cables but then again my trackpoint is not working. I did not take the keyboard out so I'm a bit stumped.

I plugged a mouse in and that works.

But the trackpoint beats it.

[TPFanatic]

Try booting it with the palmrest cable disconnected. The machine should be able to function with a trackpoint only. If it continues to be disfunctional, the connector on the motherboard may be damaged as well.

[Blender]

I boot it up without the palm rest cable and now I can use the trackpoint again.

Now I'm thinking the palm rest cable is bad.

I admit, taking the palm rest off a z61p is stiff. I took it off pretty hard..

Time for eBay?

[dr_st]

Time to disable Touchpad in the BIOS and forget about it.

But if you like to use the touchpad, then probably yes.

[TPFanatic]

Troubling.

Have you checked that the cable is still attached to the touchpad on the touchpad side? If you have the FPR, can it be checked that that still works?

The plastic clips under the left and right sides of 15" Z palmrests do take a lot of wiggling to disengage. I've taken my Z60m's palmrest off a lot of times but luckily nothing's broken on my end.

I recall, at least on my Z60m's motherboard, the white plastic female connectors didn't seem glued to the PCB very well, at least the CMOS battery and speaker connectors seemed to get loose and felt like they would break off when trying to remove those components. The palmrest connector should be pretty resilient, though.

Z60m's touchpad is pretty tiny anyway.

[Blender]

dr_st,
I prefer to use the trackpoint because I'm a die-hard Thinkpad user.

TPFanatic,
The FPR works. Hm....
I guess I should start wiggling it instead.

The FPR shares the same cable as the touchpad.
But the touchpad and buttons don't work. But the FPR works. WEIRD... lol

The trackpoint will only work if I boot up with the palm rest disconnected. So the trackpoint works.

I'm thinking that the touchpad pins in the palm rest ribbon cable might be torn. I looked on eBay and can't find a cable. Does anyone else know where I can buy one?

[TPFanatic]

There's one last possibility that, if you're running Windows, the Ultranav driver has decided to conk out. With the external mouse have you tried reinstalling the Synaptics Ultranav driver? http://support.lenovo.com/us/en/downloads/ds019164

Unless you've tried this already, in which case, you might have to buy an entirely new palmrest, which sucks since a cable should be cheaper, if anyone sold them!

Maybe buy this T61 touchpad with cable...??? http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-ThinkPad ... Swp5JWVgyJ No guarantee how much of it would work or want to fit in the Z61 palmrest, though. It's half the price of the cheapest complete Z60m palmrest that would fit on your Z61p. Unfortunately discountedlaptopparts's free shipping is, well, slow. I believe, and would try it myself should I faced this issue, that a T61 touchpad would fit in a Z61p. They're the same size, I think?


Oh, just found this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Genuine-IBM-Thi ... SwjVVVg61T But it doesn't have an FPR connector.

[Blender]

TPFanatic,
I re-installed the ultranav driver with no success. I have not tried installing a new palm rest but hopefully it does not come down to that. I actually might just buy the palm rest first..but im not sure..

Maybe the pcb suffered from ESD damage? Or I pulled to hard when I took the palm rest off..

That touchpad with the cable might also do the trick but im not sure if it would fit ( you would think so because its in the same series )

The trackpoint is somewhat tied to the touchpad via driver wise. I think.

[TPFanatic]

Yep. When the touchpad is plugged in it becomes an "Ultranav" without it it's just Trackpoint. So if the touchpad is plugged in but faulty, you lose the Trackpoint. :/

If it helps the palmrest connector is the same between Z60m and T500, so it's probably the same between Z61p and T61. I saw other listings for T61 touchpads and they title it as "T61 T60 Z61 Z60" so I'd bet they are, indeed, the same. I've never removed a touchpad from a palmrest though, it involves some small screws but I don't know what else.

[Blender]

I'm leaning towards http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-ThinkPad ... Swp5JWVgyJ

The palm rest is just plastic and the fingerprint reader works so all I need is the touchpad with cables.

Knock on wood...

[Blender]

So the T61 touchpad with cable came in yesterday and was finally able to plug this into this Z61p.

Now my ultranav is back and working as good as it used to. Everything is now working.

The touchpad with cable was pretty easy to snap in.

Thanks TPFanatic!!

[TPFanatic]

Glad to hear it worked!

[dr_st]

And thank you for updating. It's good to know that such a local repair can be made.