Toshiba Laptop shorting out from USB Port

Hi Everyone,
Just got a weird problem with my Toshiba Satellite laptop.
When I use the side USB ports to link my Clie, the connector shorts the laptop and shuts it off.

anyone heard of this before? I swear I've used these side USB ports before.

Weird, I was working on a compac (some other 'tards, not mine) today and the exact same thing happened....Now it seems that the port is blown, it doesn't reset when I plug various items in, nor does it notice that they are plugged in either...grrr USB sux!

Oh good, I'm not imagining the problem!
At first I wasn't sure what shorted the laptop, but plugging into that top USB port on the side shorted it when I tried it again.
Lower one doesn't short but also doesn't work.
Of the back two USB ports only the top one works - go mouse!

Now the question is.......
Are USB ports easy to replace?

I dont know how to help you camille, I've never had a problem with my USB port ... but ... I've never had a toshiba lappie before so ...

I'm quite irked with my compy at the moment though with the wierd drive partition. Apparently there are two partition on the hard drive. The C drive which is a FAT32 and a D drive which is a NTFS (not sure what the FAT and the NTFS means though)

Apparently installation goes to the D drive but the problem is, I've less than 1 gigs left on that drive. Opening up programs like photoshop causes the hdd size do significantly shrink.

I asked my brother if it was possible to transfer some of the space from c drive to d and he said to use partition magic. But at close to 70us dollars, I might as well get a new hard disk drive ...

Do you know how I can fix this problem economically?