Latitude 6430u- left mouse button not working...

I realize that I'm the one site member using a Dell Latitude 6430u at this point. I think there were only five or six of us at the peak (c. late 2012). But I try to keep my Latitudes for three years, so I have until June 2016.

I'm only using it as my personal system now, it spent 22 months doing double duty for work and personal. But I recently started working for an audit firm after freelancing for several years. The new job came with a laptop (even though 90% of their 'fleet' is Lenovo, they agreed to order me a new Latitude E7450 when I was hired). So my 6430u basically serves as a desktop replacement and occasional travel/vacation companion. I use an external mouse 99% of the time, but I realized a few days ago that the left mouse button (below the touchpad, the ones with the pointing stick device work fine) is not working.

I just replaced the keyboard four months ago, so I opened up the bottom panel and made sure all the ribbon connectors were securely locked in place. Ditto for the two other ribbons that appear to run from the touchpad and/or mouse button circuit board.

A new (refurb) mouse button circuit board with both mouse buttons is around $19 shipped, but I'm wondering how much hassle it will be to install? I also replaced the hinges myself about six months ago, so I've taken it almost completely apart once.

Just curious if anyone has any experience with this sort of problem?

 

It's pretty easy to change out, I did the whole palmrest (to remove the cat piss smell). Sadly the 6430U is relegated to running Ubuntu and GNU Radio these days, which it does well. It was a good machine and the wireless dock was a good idea but in the end the machine was just too big to travel with. On the workdesk these days I have a docked 6230u with a 1TB SSD, 16GB and 802.11AC and my travel machine is an ASUS Transformer T100TA 10.1". The quadcore Baytrail Atom is surprisingly usable and the battery life is amazing, I can truly go all day with this machine and it doesn't even get warm. Now if they started putting 128+GB SSD's and 4+GB of memory I'd be really interested.