Is my annual visit with my parents and as always I’m looking at their pc to fix any problems they have. They haven’t complained about it, but I found that the mouse scroll is borked. It jumps and changes scroll direction.
I couldn’t find anything useful. I found some advice about changing the number of scrolls per clicks but that didn’t help.
Any ideas?
Is it optical or mechanical?
Optical.
You probably already knew this, but wipe it down good where the mouse meets the desk/mouse pad. I always get big globs of gunk buildup, that can interfere with mousing.
Tell us what you have tried. Did some magnifier lintfree cleaning of the optics? Does it happen on every surface? Randomly appearing or consistently bad? Anything new in the environment – new mousepad, new pet? 🐱
Unless I’m the one reading it wrong and not you guys, it seems to me like he’s not having an issue with the optical sensor at all—it’s the mouse wheel. That’s what you mean by “mouse scroll”, right?
As far as fixing it—I can’t think of a single thing you could do apart from disassembling the mouse and cleaning out the wheel mechanism as best you can. It wouldn’t surprise me if the clicker was just muffed up, though.
Oops, maybe I are the wrong.
That’s right, it’s just the scrolling that’s broken, tracking works fine. The scroll problem happens everywhere so I guess it’s just time for a new mouse.
If you cant get it apart to clean the scroll wheels, you can try compressed air into the cracks to blow the schmoo around. It may be as simple as a little dust bunny in there.
Buy a new mouse?
Yeah you can buy a pretty decent mouse for all of $20.
Or $10 if we’re talking “just needs to be good enough for the folks” quality. In fact…
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005EJH6RW/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_l4llzb2AMAY5A
$10 for wireless
The $10 wireless mouse I got from Amazon was crap. It didn’t like my dock for some reason. I had to hunt down software to install to make it function, and then the first time I undocked, went home, came in the next day and docked, and it never worked right again. It’s in the bottom of my little pedestal drawers. The guy next to me quit/got fired and I took his mouse.
Taking it apart isn’t possible, but I gave the wheel a few good whacks and it’s as good as new so thanks.
I was so certain it was a software issue, it never occurred to me the failure might be mechanical.
Ah! Percussive maintenance. A classic move. If it doesn’t work use a bigger hammer.
fyi - a lot of mice come apart. You need to peel back the feet pads and the screws are under them.