News & Views

I am so delighted that I was able to fix my Wacom tablet I gotta tell about it.

I had just replaced the plastic cover and the little tefflon feet on the mouse and it started giving me all sorts of trouble. A post to NCMUG and some other techie list told me to trash the tablet .plist and/or reinstall software, etc. and I did those things and it would work for a while and then quit. The light would go out and the mouse would stop responding or the light would be on and the mouse not responding.

I began to suspect a hardware problem so I fiddled with the cord a bit and discovered that the light went out when I moved it to the right and came back on when I moved it to the left.

Since my next tablet will be a bluetooth with a new iMac I didn't want to buy another USB, so I went at it with screwdrivers and got it apart. Then I managed to very carefully pull the 5 wire plug (that white rectangular thing you can see next to the light inside the tablet) off of the board. Once free I pulled gently on the wires, and sure enough one pulled out of the cord. Its a bundle of bare wires without a plastic sleeve like the others have.

The easy fix would be to cut off the 5 wire plug and trim the wires back and put them on a new plug but I don't know where to find one of those so I trimmed the wires with enough lead on the plug and then, using pliers, pulled the cord out of that fastener thingy that anchors it in the tablet. It was glued so it wasn't easy. Then I trimmed back the wires to where they were healthy again and stripped them. Then I went to Radio Shack where I got some of that shrink wrap plastic tubeing for wires and a wire soldering kit.

I have a burn on one knuckle and one on my pinky, but my tablet is back together and working beautifully.

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This article originally appeared in NCMUG News, the newsletter of North Coast Mac Users Group, Santa Rosa, CA

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