Constant Left Click

Hi all,
my buddy is having some issues with his laptop. its a toshiba,i dont know the model, i dont think it matters though.
symptoms are that the left click doesnt function right. it seems to always be left clicking kinda. like it i try to double click something, it doesnt acknowledge it as only a double click, it registers it as many more i guess because stuff gets highlighted (double clicking text) briefly and then unhighlighted once i stop clicking. its weird.
if i try to click on an icon on the desktop, it instead clicks some other icon to the right and lower than the one i wanted. clicking works fine for items in the taskbar.
when a browser window is open (chrome, edge, whatever), the page scrolls to the bottom, same with any other list that has a scroll bar present.
i took his hard drive and installed it in my work laptop. all the above issues go away completely. no problems.

while i was looking at his laptop, i saw it had 3 usb ports. one of them had the tab inside totally broken off. one was bent down (so that you couldnt use it if you wanted to. i bent it back up but it didnt recognize any peripherals), the third had a wireless mouse dongle in it. mouse was working other than issues above. i took out the dongle, issues above were still present using touchpad. i put the dongle back in and then the mouse wasnt working. some wiggling made it work eventually.
i tried to reverse the mouse buttons from righty to lefty, and the clicking thing seemed to be ok, but the scrolling issue was still there. (i think thats what happened, could be that nothing actually got any better. yeah, sorry for crappy details on this).

so, obviously (??) some type of hardware issue. im wondering if the USB tab being bent/missing (and either shorted or open) could be causing the issue?
any thoughts would be appreciated.

 

I think the above is a good indication of what's wrong.
Three USB ports and all three are damaged.

In all probability, yes.
Replacing the ports won't be cheap. And how long before they are again damaged?

 

thats reasonable on your part, i kinda thought the usb thing would be too easy of a solve.
those usb tabs arent complete circuits until something is plugged in (right?), so missing tabes shouldnt really be a problem, but if there was a short, then i dont know.
i tried to take the cover off the machine, but i didnt have enough time, and i didnt want to rush and break anything further trying to get it apart.

 

im sure he had the dongle in each of those ports at one time or another and banged it into something or something into it.
im not trying to fix the ports necessarily, i just want to have it run without the issues. i mean, if i could just disconnect the ports and things worked fine, he could live without a mouse. (if the ports were the problem, which may or may not be the case)

 

I overlooked that the touchpad has the same issue.

 

Thinking about this more, perhaps the issue is actually touch pad related and the broken USB ports are just red herrings. If there's something wrong with the touch pad it would send that signal out even when I was using the mouse. It would always be present. Next time I stop over there I will see if I can turn off the touch pad, or worst case open the case and unplug it and see if issues go away.

 

Try fn and f9 button together.-Hold down fn button, first, and press f9
Problem maybe , then that you cannot use a mouse if usb ports are damaged.

 

I would also look at the possibility that the laptop base is picking up movement with the palm resting on it, on the side next to the touchpad, as I have had the mouse move when not where I wanted it to, and found I was resting my right hand on the base,next o the touchpad, and that stopped when I remembered to lift my hand of the base.

 

All so check for virus and malware on system.

There are some Trojan that can do this.

Tim W can help with that.