I have a crappy laptop

Well first off to drop it off is usually around 80-100 dollars depending on the store. Getting cleaned could be something you can do on your own. A few screws and a can of duster will do wonders. In regards to your USB ports. It sounds like that might be a driver problem because you have a laptop you're going to have a intergrated USB port on your mother board therefore if your mother board has the wrong drivers or no drivers supporting the USB then they won't work. If they worked and you didn't change anything you could try blowing them out with duster and trying again and if that doesn't work you could try to find new drivers to reinstall for your mother board/usb ports. Another thing to understand also is if they did work at some point and now they aren't the drivers you did have which they worked with might have gone corrupt and now causing them to not function properly. 1 other thing I just thought about is, how old is your laptop? Do you know if it has USB 1.0, 2.0, or 3.0? If it's 2.0 most anything will work with it just the same as 3.0 but if you have 1.0 ports on your laptop and trying to plug in a 2.0 external hard drive or something then that could be causing a problem as well.

My suggestion to you is to try all the methods above to get your laptop to work before spending a pretty penny on investigating if it is anything more complex than the above. If it really is another underlying issue with your USB ports than that may be your only option. Hope this helps.

I've gone through all this before. I don't know much about computers. I have let friends who do look at it and no luck, they were stumped. And that's the reason that I am taking it in.