Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

tip: check your mouse before going to red alert.

(1/5) > >>

nudone:
a couple of days ago my computer suddenly started acting strange - like it had a mind of its own.

i'd be dragging a window across the screen only to have the cursor suddenly lose its grip on the window. or, i'd try and move icons around and they wouldn't move at all - or they would if they were in a certain area.

i suspected that either the pc was infected or a piece of hardware was about to fail.

after pondering on the doom scenario of the pc dying i eventually thought i better swap the mouse for another. whilst doing that i noticed a thin white hair (must have been a dog hair) covering the lens on the underside of the mouse. i removed it and everything now works perfectly again.

maybe it was coincidence. it does seem a little odd that the hair was effecting mouse clicks but i shall just assume that somehow the camera information the lens picks up was going crazy and some how sent the mouse funny.

moral of the story: keep your mouse clean - even optical ones.

Darwin:
Good tip, nudone! Just to add to it - the same sort of behaviour is possible when the batteries in a cordless, optical mouse start to go as well, so one could also try swapping fresh batteries in to see if that remedies things.

f0dder:
If you have an optical mouse, you should clean the lens every now and then, to avoid strange incidents like the nude one's :) - I usually use a q-tip with household ethanol on it.

Oh, another weird thing: if I leave my cellphone close to the mouse cord, I can tell a few seconds in advance if I'm going to get a SMS or phone call... the mouse cursor freaks out :)

Carol Haynes:
Same thing happened to me recently - drove me mad until I looked and pulled out about an ounce of fluff !!

On a related note does anyone else have an issue with mice where the scroll wheel seems to behave erratically? For example sometimes when I start to scroll a window with the mouse wheel it doesn't stop jittering about after I have finished (and it even affects other windows) until I tap the wheel again.

I have tried 4 different mice, with different drivers and on different machines and get this problem randomly with them all and on all systems. Is it me being ham fisted or is this a common problem?

cmpm:
Try turning off smooth and auto scrolling in your internet options.
Or firefox options.
Then go to the mouse in control panel.
Set it to scroll 3 lines at a time.

Personally never installed mouse software for my optical mouse.
After a reformat.
So it reads as a regular ps/2 compatible mouse.
It's a Microsoft wired optical mouse with a wheel of course.

I disabled the middle button. The wheel button.
When I had the software installed.
Cuz it kept bring up the arrows in a circle for scrolling.
Which was annoying to me,
cuz I'd accidently click the wheel while scrolling.

Sometimes I have to reset the scroll to the above after making other changes or cleaning my compouter. I don't know why, but it will reset to the way I like it. And scroll smoothly without jumping around like it did.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page