Scalpel! Superglue! This mouse won't fix its own ball Hurrah! A fresh week awaits! Who knows what delights lurk within. One thing is for sure, it all starts with a tale from the Who, Me? mailbag. Today's story comes from "Dave" (no, definitely not his name) who was working for a small software and hardware consultancy. "Every engineer," he said, "was either a computer science or …
Took apart the mouse on the very expensive new family PC and after a bit of experimental poking, managed to break one of the o-rings.
Quietly shitting myself, I reassembled and whilst it seemed to work, was anticipating the bollocking to come.
Penny only dropped when the o-ring re-grew.
I do remember quite clearly the ball-cleaning sessions I used to have with my Microsoft Mouse. It was quite easy to tell when it needed cleaning too : the movement started getting bumpy because something was sticking to the ball.
It was the heyday of mouse mats as well - they improved ball movement.
Thank $deity for wireless laser mice. Just have to blow on it every now and then to dislodge some minuscule piece of dust that makes the pointer not work properly.
When I did student support, we'd frequently find someone had gone into one of the labs and removed several (or all) of the balls from the computer mice in that lab. As the mice were cheap, we just superglued the ball cover in place and replace them when needed. Not very environment friendly, but it was either that or explain to the lecturer who had booked the lab why their students could not use the mice.
The funny thing is that every student we caught doing this appeared to think they were the first. We were dealing with this regularly.
Some years back the company I worked for at the time lost the contract to supply PCs to a local further education college.
We were told it was down to the fact that one of our competitors offered a 'College Grade Mouse' i.e. you needed a special tool to open the ball cover. Apparently the size to weight ratio of the balls made them excellent for throwing at people.
At the FE/HE college I worked at we used to put U-bolts in the back of the case and thread all peripheral leads through them. This was specifically aimed at mouse leads so the RM serial mice with steel ball bearings didn't get stolen - they were about £60 each at the time. The mouse traps were glued shut. Pain in the posterior for maintenance but we were secure!
I was less than happy one day when I noted that the little darlings had decided to cut the cables to steal the mice - most of them were electronics students and one had worked out they could just solder the leads back together ... doh!
My best mates mum was the admin, awkward chats were had when I was over his house...
Used to regularly make her shit herself by remotely ejecting all the cdroms on the multi changer.
Was presented with a ream of printouts detailing the last 6 months of my network activity, I then pointed out that it only covered my user account, and they really should change the default network account passwords and not let the RM engineers be so easily shoulder surfed...
That they should add users not just groups to folder permissions, and thanks miller's mum for hosting the quake binaries in a hidden folder in her home share 8 player death match was awesome
I got my comeuppance in the end, I started my career working at fe and he institutions dealing with scrotes like me, full on poacher turned gamekeeper..
It still happens occasionally (at least prior to the pandemic) with certain brands of hotel who have such glass desks in their rooms when you're on a business trip and trying to use your laptop and mouse on the desk.
Still at least it does finally give a use for those complimentary magazines of local "attractions" etc that they also tend to dump in the room too...
I remember at some point having an early what-at-least-claimed-to-be-laser mouse, it was probably a Logitech. It required a specially patterned mouse pad - highly reflective with a very fine grid silkscreened on it - longitudinal and latitudinal lines very slightly different shades of blue. Glad we got rid of THAT nonsense.
I believe that this would not work with the original mouse systems 3 button ones.
They would also work on anything with any kind of horizontal/vertical lines on it, even math paper from college blocks.
Opening such a wondrous thing revealed two optical chips, one per axis. Something looking like a solar cell grid encased in clear glass like acrylic that formed a DIL 8 case, much like the noble and snobbish relative to a mundane NE555.
Further investigation revealed metal mirrors in the upper part of the mouse to reflect the reflected light from the red and (quite rare at those times) blue-ish LED for the respective axis onto those "solar cell" photo magic chips.
It required a specially patterned mouse pad - highly reflective with a very fine grid silkscreened on it
I don't recall a Logitech one, but Mouse Systems did make one and in fact Sun Microsystems Optical Mouse Type 4 was in fact rebranded Mouse Systems M-4. If my memory serves.
Blimey, is it already time to mention this (https://forums.theregister.com/forum/containing/3442559) again?
In Swedish, in addition to the double-entendre inherent in the word fall "ball", the word for "mouse" is aslo a well-established colloquial term for female genitalia.
Remember my former colleague who blew up a power supply from my comment last week?
He found himself on the phone with another of his steady clients one afternoon. Also female, this one was north of 90 years old and hard of hearing. Situation only got better from hearing his side of the conversation, with him repeating himself and raising his voice as he went along;
- Well it's possible you just have dust in your mouse*.
- DUST IN YOUR MOUSE.
- NO, IN THE MOUSE.
- You can just unscrew** it and take the ball out.
- Take the BALL out of the MOUSE.
- OUT OF THE MOUSE. TAKE THE BALL OUT OF THE MOUSE.
- Yeah, then just blow on it.
(...you get the drift)
*) Off to a great start, right off the bat.
**) Sadly this one isn't naughty in Swedish.
It wasn't until he hung up he realized everyone in the office was staring at him.
- What? What did I say? It was Jane Doe, you know she can't hear a word of what I'm saying.
Did he look something like this? ----------------------------------->
Flea market sellers are....a different breed. Takes a special type to gather up all that old junk, store it who knows where, then load it into the vehicle, schlep it to the flea, set it all up, then load 95% of it back into the vehicle and schlep it back, unpack it and store it again....repeat weekly. Knowing (though in some cases I have seen that is not the case) that with every week, the probability of selling goes down, as the stuff ages, and demand decreases..
Quote
"I saw a guy selling old PC stuff at a flea market recently that would make a fortnight in Chernobyl seem a lower health risk than ownership of said items.
The keyboards looked particularly rich in biological samples."
I wondered what happens to all my old keyboards that suffer the Friday fate during BOFH reading time...
Nuke 'em from orbit... only way to be sure
Back in my support days, I remember a chap in sales asking how we kept our keyboards clean because the keyboard on his home PC was filthy
Told him it was simple. Gently prise the keycaps off and wash in warm, slightly soapy water. Rinse and allow to dry. Whilst drying, gently vacuum (using the dusting brush) the rest of the keyboard.
When the keycaps have dried, simply refit them.
Of course, we had to lend him a keyboard the next day so he could work out the correct order to replace the keycaps in
Still use a mouse mat here, cloth top, foam backed ones, generally secured to the desk with double sided tape. Even with the optical mouse I use now.
The cloth absorbs dirt and grime before the sliders on the bottom of the mouse get cached in it. When at a temporary desk I get tired of cleaning them at least once a day to eliminate stiction or tracking issues as the mouse gets jacked up beyond its focal point.
Of course every six months or so you will look at the pad and notice "that mouse pad's filthy". You can sponge them down a couple of times before the fabric comes off but ultimately you do need to regard then as disposable items.
"The cloth absorbs dirt and grime before the sliders on the bottom of the mouse get cached in it. When at a temporary desk I get tired of cleaning them at least once a day to eliminate stiction or tracking issues as the mouse gets jacked up beyond its focal point."
Another solution is to clean your desk regularly and get in 18 months of more frequent than usual handwashing practice.
My daughter asked me for a mouse pad the other day; it seems her desk is too shiny for the optical mouse, and the bit of paper she was using was falling apart!!! Not having one to hand, I had a dig through my workshop and found her a promo one I'd liberated from work some time previously. Still in good condition, it was from a local-ish motor company and promoted the BMW 328ci, which a quick google dates it to the late 90s, about ten years before she was born! She went away happy..
I still have a wired, balled Microsoft mouse as my daily pointer manipulator. It must be at least 16 years old now and still going strong.
I bought a newer wired, optical Microsoft mouse for a laptop about five years ago. Its pointer movement was becoming erratic a few years back and I ended up throwing it away.
They truly don't make them like they used to.
Actually I've never had any serious complaints about any Microsoft PC peripheral hardware.
The sidewinder Joystick (with USB connection) is still going, as are the 2 x intellimouse optical (although I did have to replace the USB cable on one after the wires broke internally at the flex point where the cable enters the mouse), The Xbox style controller with USB just works and my sidewinder mouse with all the options keeps soldering on...
Sometimes I think Microsoft should have gone into hardware because this stuff is so reliable, but then I remember reliable stuff ends up bankrupting companies so I'm just glad I got some quality peripherals before they bailed :-)
I bought a Microsoft wireless mouse and keyboard set, and the scroll wheel was erratic from day 1. Called and complained, and they sent me a whole new set, and didn't ask for the old one back. Being an engineer, I then disassembled the bad mouse and found that the wheel wasn't *quite* in the right spot - when not clicking the wheel, it was a bit too far down, so the optical encoder sometimes missed the wheel spokes. Wrapped a bit of Scotch (/cello) tape around the right bit to add a bit of height, and it worked just fine.
I didn't need two sets, so I sold one for half the original purchase price. Still have the other set. To this day, I'm not sure which set has the repaired mouse!
I still have a mouse pad. I picked it up at a thrift shop. The only reason I bought it is because it has printed on it the floor plan of Riverview Mental hospital, with all the fire exits shown.
I thought that this mouse pad was such a monumentally bad idea, that I just had to buy it.
Mine is the one with the really long sleeves.
Swiss Army Knife user here - the mini chisel on that did an excellent job of stripping roller crud off, and it was oh so satisfying when it came off in a single unbroken (aside from where the blade initially sliced across it) strip.
Whilst I also don't miss the maintenance requirements that ball mice had, I do still miss the mechanical inertia they could provide to pointer movements if you wanted - these days you either have to live with the precise but "dead" movements that optical sensors provide, or suffer various different attempts to implement simulated inertia which are guaranteed to always choose the wrong moment to kick in and send your pointer across the far side of your desktop. There was also something oddly satisfying about the way it felt lowering the mouse back onto the mousepad after relocating it during a particular long pointer move operation, as first the ball made contact and then rose up into position with its weight supported by the pad, whilst the rest of the mouse body remained held slightly airborne in your hand but now noticeably lighter.
This is part of why retro computing using the original hardware is so popular in comparison to using emulators running on newer hardware - there's some very distinct physical attributes (looks, sounds, tactile sensations) to those older systems that anyone familiar with them will instantly pick up on as being missing or not quite emulated correctly on anything other than the real deal.
I found that using a material harder than the rollers such as a metal blade would scratch the roller surfaces and they'd pick the crud even faster, leading to much more frequent cleaning being required. I always used a soft plastic "blade" to scrape the crud off once I learned from my mistakes.
Not so much the internal but external crud.
Once had the semi regular pleasure of dealing with a Colleague that had the worlds sweatiest mits.
I "sourced" a few spare mice and gingerly swapped the rodent out when any issues were reported.
Given the current climate, a BNC suit and bio hazard team would be called in for these :)
I was disciplined (nearly lost the job) when I had a young customer of the female persuasion come to my counter with a faulty mouse she had bough a week earlier.
I knew about the crud issue.
I (probably 17 at the time) confidently opened the little cover and popped out the weighted ball - reaching for the alcohol and a plastic scraper for the contacts
I made the mistake of trying to engage her (she was standing in front of me, and I was trying to show her how to do this herself) when I said -
'Ah mice - the get tired of having their balls rubbed on the desk'
There was an awkward silence.
The floor manager heard me.... riot act read. My only defense was that I could have thought of a better chat up line if I had done it on purpose!
We bought my aged mother a laptop who struggled with it. We gave her a fish tank screen saver, so we had fish swimming around.
I came in one day to find her with a watering can in hand and she asked "I thought the water might needed topping up - which hole is it?".
You're more right than you know. A "dirty" air filter is actually more effective at removing particulate than a new one. (Makes sense in retrospect, the larger holes are now plugged.) Current COVID-inspired advice is to only change/clean the filter when it's bad enough to decrease efficiency; frequent replacement results in dirtier air!
Ever had to deal with a situation for which the only solution was a new hardware and a pack of wet wipes?
Not a mouse but a whole laptop! It came back from the user in a state where a hazmat suit would have been desirable before handling it. They have been given a warning that if the replacement is treated the same way they may be charged if it fails.
I used a colleague's desk one day and found that the scroll wheel on his mouse had a thick, sticky, 2 or 3mm thick ring of orange crud around it. It had even been squared off by the edges of the plastic cover.
I have no idea how it continued working. Once I figured out that it wasn't some kind of rubber grip, I refused to use the damn thing.
Twice: Once directly, and once indirectly.
Both were from the time that I did work as a field repair tech. The direct time was when I went on site to a field office that had a dead server. it was literally out at a construction site, and when I opened the case of the dead server, it was covered on the inside with mouse droppings. Thankfully, I had a truck, and happened to have a flattened cardboard box in the back for the server to sit on as I brought it back to the shop for the depot techs to work on.
The depot techs had a pretty bad job at times; Since the outfit I worked for also handled 3rd party extended warranty service for computers,* we had some really nasty ones come in. I walked in one fine afternoon and found that the inside of the building just reeked of cigarette smoke. Seems this one person's computer broken down, and they had this warranty service on it. They brought it in, and the depot tech took one look at it, documented the state that it was in, and duly called it in as 'unrepairable, data salvage only'. The house it was in probably had 3-4 adults, and all of them were carton-a-day smokers. There was a layer of nicotine residue all over the inside of the machine, all the fans were seized up, the works.
* i.e., you bought the thing from a retailer, and instead of having the factory warranty extended, it got fobbed off to some other company that in turned hired us to fix your machine if/when it broke.
Well, not quite.
Ever had to deal with a situation for which the only solution was a new hardware and a pack of wet wipes?
Many years ago when I was fixing radios for a living (having an FCC general licence at the time was literally a meal ticket) we had a rather hefty HF radio come in and the odour being emitted almost required the donning of a mask.
Most high power two way radios[1] are not designed to transmit for more than a few seconds (perhaps a few 10s of seconds) at a time[2]. Due to a manufacturing defect (that I eventually found), when this transmitter was keyed up (so transmitting at about 100W), it remained in transmit mode even when the transmit button was released. Needless to say it failed quite shortly after that first (continuous and hot) transmission.
The power output stage (a very large power transistor and associated circuitry) had burned out completely and released all the magic smoke. The remnants of the parts had, however, stuck to the inside of the box. Cleaning it was interesting to say the least. I wasn't allowed to do that inside at my workstation; had to take it outside to the garage (we serviced a lot of vehicle radios) and even then the stench was almost overpowering.
I did manage to save the PCB which was designed for relatively high temperatures; the power stage failed before it could delaminate.
I remember we billed the manufacturer for it (warranty repair) with a separate line item that read 'Decontamination equipment'.
[1] Your cell phone has a maximum transmit power of about 2W and rarely actually goes that high. That amount of transmit power is manageable in the thermal sense.
[2] RF transmitters can be quite inefficient, FM in particular which sometimes (particularly in the years I am talking about here) required a linear power amplifier which can only ever achieve 50%, so for every watt transmitted the power stage has to dissipate (as heat) a watt. 100W transmitted = 100W heat at the power amp.
[RF transmitters can be quite inefficient, FM in particular which sometimes (particularly in the years I am talking about here) required a linear power amplifier which can only ever achieve 50%, so for every watt transmitted the power stage has to dissipate (as heat) a watt. 100W transmitted = 100W heat at the power amp.
.. that explains why the digital radio systems we have a [RedactedCo] have mahoosive heat sinks on them. Might also explain why a faulty kept tripping the breaker on the PDU it was plugged into as well, even though the power strip it was plugged into was fat, dumb, and happy.
Supported some prototype software for the ARTCCs in the US, had 25-30 giant trackballs so the controllers could do their thing. Had to clean these frequently as they were in-use 24x7 .. the curved tool in a pair of travel nail clippers fit the roller perfectly but it was a disgusting, thankless job.
Back in the early 90's I served six months in Purgatory as the service manager for a ComputerLand store. Not a week went by when we didn't get a call or two late in the afternoon (after school was out) asking, "Do you have mouse balls?" followed by laughter, giggles and a quick hang-up.
I worked at a good university (known for science, engineering and medicine) in the computing department 30 years ago. A PhD teaching assistant once brought in a keyboard, probably a Sun or Apple one, saying it wasn't working. I could immediately see it was glistening somewhat. Turns out this TA had puked on the keyboard, then rinsed it under a tap to clean it. It still didn't work, so the next obvious step was to douse it in cooking oil. Weirdly that didn't do the trick either so (s)he brought the sorry mess down to me.
Although it does tend to take a bit longer to get to the "sticky, bouncy, inaccurate" state. The little knobbies in the bowl that hold the ball in alignment get these neat furry caps. (nowadays mostly catfur) and the light panel can sometimes need cleaning. It is however much easier than the mechanical wheels on my original trackball which needed pulling the whole critter apart and the use of a toothpick and a can of compressed air, and quite a bit of meditation to prevent permanently disfiguring the wheel. The scroll wheel on my 20 (20+ ?) year old logitech trackball originally had the same issue. Last time I had to disassemble and clean that I (carefully) put box tape on either side of the wheel, and now I can clean it with compressed air without tearing it apart.
My variant on this story was when a trackball on a powerbook 170 stopped working. Trackball was in the keypad, simple twist ring to open and remove the ball for cleaning (like a regular mouse on its back). The ball 'rolled' on two small rollers. My rollers appeared to have rubber rings about 2mm wide on them, I assumed for traction. One was delicately peeling off the underlying roller. "Aha" I thought, "the rubber ring has perished, I just need to replace them". Called the local computer parts shop specializing in apple stuff (this, thank God, was prior to 'genius bars' and other stupidities). Much confused back-and-forthing as I explained I wanted to order replacement rubber rings for my mouse rollers, and they thought I wanted new rollers, and I insisted the rollers themselves were fine I just needed the rings. Eventually the problem clicked for the woman I was speaking to and she said "I kind of suspect those 'rings' are matted hair and fluff - try removing it from both rollers and putting the ball back in". Problem solved, but quite embarrassing..
I've told this story before, but I was the department 'IT fixer' (though not an IT Department employee), and jumpy mice were a common issue for the aforementioned reason of skin oil and crud building up on the rollers. Cleaning them was a simple 5 minute job.
But one guy in the department was filthy, and he made sandwiches at his desk. There were crumbs everywhere, and since he used butter and a knife, grease smears everywhere, too. And he never washed his hands. He'd just rub them together when he'd finished cramming food into his mouth (which was a sight to be seen in itself).
Emptying his keyboard of food residue was bad enough, but one time I was showing him how to do something on his PC and the mouse was basically not moving at all.
I opened it up and nearly threw up. The entire cavity was filled with black, gritty grease-like material.
Reminds me of a time when I was at a client site doing some private work for a former colleague who was trying to start up his own consultancy back in the early 90s. The client had another technician on site at the time (from a local PC supplier I think) and he was investigating some issues with the mouse. He declared that there was some "interference" on the serial port causing the problem. I waited until he left the clients office, pulled the ball out of the mouse and cleaned the dirt from the rollers. Problem fixed.
That seems to depend on how those glidepads are glued on.
The usual cheap ones seem to have typical "sticky paper" glue, that absorbs normal air moisture and then begins to soften up and leak at the sides of the glidepads.
This leaked and softened glue not only collects any kind of dirt, but also tends to transport even more moisture towards the center of the glue pad, deteriorating the still uncompromised portion of the glue until the glidepad falls off.
I tend to remedy that with cyanoacrylate or similar after cleaning both mouse case and glide pad thoroughly. That seems to mostly prevent further buildup of dirt, greasy stuff that sticks on the glidepads edges still happens, though.
If you know someone working in the wood furniture industry, try to get some of their glide tape that they use at the circular saw to prevent scratches to the boards. Its some kind of duct tape, only with a very slick and sturdy surface. Put this under any mouse (window for the optical sensor must be cut in, of course) and you never have glide and dirt issues again.
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