I am repairing some damage to a recently acquired Sony Vaio PCG-z600 notebook; it's the top model in the range, and a really lovely machine:

- PIII-800
- ATI Mobility M1 8MB
- Yamaha YMF-744

I've pulled the parts together from a couple of machines, including one with a lesser PIII-500 CPU and Neomagic graphics, to get one fully functioning machine. I replaced the CPU heatsink thermal interface material with a new phase-change pad, I've upped the memory to max, fitted a 128GB mSATA drive and reinstalled Win98SE. Everything (except the one thing below) works.

However, these notebooks were bought as loose parts, and the nicer ATI + PIII-800 equipped one in particular, had been messed about with (missing all screws) and the PS2 trackpad header on the motherboard was chewed up and damaged, including the end of the FFC cable all chewed up. So whilst the laptop functions perfectly normal now... the inbuilt trackpad is not able to be connected (using a USB mouse for the moment).

The header on the motherboard is one of these:

That's the one on the Neomagic equipped motherboard, and whilst it looks okay (and I *guess* I could desolder it), the white flip-down latch is broken on this one and does not remain in place. The receptacle on the ATI equipped motherboard was cracked and missing the latch entirely, so I desoldered it entirely. It still needs cleaning and the legs removing, but the solder pad layout looks like this:

It needs to take an 8-way FFC, approximately 5mm in width:

I can, if pushed, re-use the trackpad-to-trackpad-pcb ffc from the Neomagic machine (the trackpad pcb is split, and there's a short ffc between each part)... but it's shorter than needed from trackpad to motherboard, and I suspect I'll end up ripping it.

What's the right terminology to find a replacement FFC receptacle like this (does anyone with a keen eye know a suitable part number to replace it?), and is it possible to buy generic, pre-tinned FFC ribbon? I don't want the original parts... I think them being too short is why the previous owner/repairer shredded the ends of the cable and damaged the socket when disassembling the laptop.

Edit: Found a source of generic, longer 0.5mm pitch FFC cables. Just need to identify the socket type.