Stupid computer design

My sister has a Dell Latitude C600. Naturally, I'm the family tech support.

Now, the C600 has one major flaw: it comes with only one, unsecured, integrated USB port. Well, it's secured, if you call "secured" tied to the motherboard through the four pins that it sends data through. Recently, this USB port became loose. Then it stopped working. Turns out that, when it was loose, the jiggling broke one of the four pins that connected it to the computer, rendering the port itself completely useless.

The computer has two PCMCIA CardBus slots, arranged in one-on-top-of-the-other fashion. One of these (the bottom one, naturally) has been taken up by an Ethernet adapter that, in turn, blocks the top slot. Our first solution to the USB port problem was "buy a cardbus card!". It would be nice, since my sister is madly in love with her Wacom graphite tablet, but would be even better if she could do the USB and ethernet at the same time. So we bought a 4-port USB card and a strange-looking USB-to-Ethernet adapter.

It works, but the 4-port USB card requires additional power to work at all. Guess where it gets this power? From a power cord, which came with it, that plugs into an existing USB port. And, with the one USB port on the notebook gone (yeah, I snapped it out...oops), the only way this'll work is if the power cord plugs into another computer's USB port.

Fortunately, we have two other computers (a desktop at the same area she frequently works in, and my notebook which is usually with me at class, etc) which she can plug into. Unfortunately, this ties the two major things she does with her computer to an existing computer with a free USB port.

I hate old technology.