Aww, the famous ball style rolling mouse. They’re easily characterised by the hard ball which rolls underneath the mouse. They have been around for donkeys’ years, and have since been replaced with the more reliable “optical” mouse (An optical mouse has no ball underneath; instead, there is a bright red “laser” light). However, they are still kicking around in millions of homes and businesses. The problem with this style of mouse is that they begin to fail when the internal rollers get dirty. By failing, I mean that the cursor on the screen will no longer move fluently when moving the mouse. The cursor may skip, jump, or stop altogether. Thankfully, there is a quick and easy way to clean this classic ball-style mouse. Today we are going to walk through the cleaning process, and hopefully save millions of mice from being chucked into the rubbish bin

HOW TO CLEAN A CLASSIC ROLLER-BALL STYLE MOUSE

1) OPEN MOUSE: Remove the cover which holds the roller-ball into place. To do this, twist the cover in a counter-clockwise direction with 2 fingers (note the direction of the yellow arrows in the diagram). The cover will un-latch and become removable. Remove the cover and the roller-ball.

2) CLEAN BOTH ROLLERS: Inside the mouse there are 2 rollers (note the 2 rollers highlighted in yellow in the diagram). These 2 rollers are the culprit when a ball-style mouse begins to fail. They accumulate dirt and grime which interferes with the normal operation of the mouse. The ball makes contact with these 2 rollers which in turn moves the cursor on the screen. One roller moves the cursor in the vertical direction, and the other roller moves the cursor in the horizontal direction. Clean both rollers by scraping the dirt off with a small knife, fingernail, or dry cloth. When finished cleaning, you can optionally throw a vacuum up to the bottom of the mouse just to suck out all of the loose debris. That should fix the problem!

3) RE-ASSEMBLE MOUSE: Place the ball back inside the mouse and re-secure the cover. Twist the cover in a clockwise direction to latch and secure.

This completes the mouse cleaning procedure! Your mouse should now be operational again. If this procedure fails, you are pretty much out of luck In this case, its time for a new mouse. Go for an optical mouse this time around, and you won’t have to deal with this hassle ever again!

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 5th, 2008 at 11:29 am and is filed under Computer Hardware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.