Mouse smoke

	Mouse smoke
Some People's Parents	Prev \| TOC \| Next

I had a little problem with my computer the other day. The mouse quit working and started spewing smoke out around the mouse keys. I quickly unplugged it, which released a great puff of smoke under pressure, and then the smoke stopped.

I shut the computer off, opened my bedroom window and went for supper. Mom was surprised when I volunteered to help with supper, but after I told her the story she was more understanding, if a little skeptical.

At supper I told Dad about the smoke, and you could see the skeptical light come on and flash "Exaggeration! Exaggeration!" After his Dad told the story of his uncle's story of the "million of cats!" that turned out to be "one sad little kitten", he never lost his skepticism. So I hammed it up, with lots of gestures and big grins, but I was careful to describe exactly what happened. It was astounding enough the way it was.

It was Friday night and I had most of my homework done, so I went out to a role playing game after supper. When I got back, about 2:00am, I found a note on my computer and a neat piece of tape over the mouse port.

This is the note:

Dear Son,

I am attaching this note to your computer to let you know what happened when I tried to fix your mouse problem.

First of all, it looks like your mouse port is definitely fried. I turned on the computer and things were OK, with no mouse attached. Then I plugged the mouse in and, just as you said, smoke came out of the mouse, and I yanked it out!

I took a look inside the computer and the mouse port is attached to the motherboard. I went looking on the web for a new motherboard and waddaya know, your two year old computer is obsolete. You can't get a new motherboard without getting new memory, a new processor, and a new power supply. You're looking at about $400!

So I looked for a used mother board, and the one you have has recently become famous for its frying mouse ports, so all the used boards that could be used to replace it easily have been snapped up like hot cakes.

So I said to myself, "Self", I said, "What about the old style mouse that plugged into a serial port?" I tried that. No drivers. I had to download a driver from a web site.

It worked! And then some strange things happened. The mouse started jumping over windows, if it approached the window at an angle near a corner. So it's sort of fixed, but you have to be careful where you move the mouse. It should be OK for now.

Love,

Dad

I mentioned this problem to some of my friends on IRC. I got the expected "funny" responses, about not needing a mouse to use IRC, and how fast was I moving the mouse anyway? But I also got a link to a web site with a different driver.

I installed it, and it solved the corner jumping problem that Dad found. However, it introduced a new problem: every hour on the hour the computer plays the "Star Spangled Banner" and sends an e-mail to my mother, my sister, and all the other female names in my address book with a list of all the web sites I was at in the last day. Then my virus scanner removed the virus from the mouse driver, sort of. I mean it got rid of the American music and the compulsory report to Mom. The mouse pointer is still there, but you can only move it with <CTRL>-<arrow key> for big movements and <ALT>-<arrow key> for one-pixel-at-a-time movement.

My sister was the first to find out about my problems with the Star Spangled Mouse Driver. So it was no surprise that she was one of the first to come up with a fix. She had an old mouse that came with a driver just for it, but operated off the serial port. It was a "cat" mouse, with fur and a brown tail, and pretty little icons for the mouse cursor. It purrs when you move it. The mouse pointer curls up and goes to sleep if you don't use it for a while. It's just fine except for one thing:
All text prints in hot pink when you use it.

I got fed up with all these mouse problems today. My computer is fairly new, and so is my version of Windows. I have another choice for where to plug in my mouse, other than the mouse port and the serial port. I can use the USB port! So I went to the computer store today, and for $10 bought a brand new USB mouse!

It replaces the logo on the Windows startup with its own logo. Its default setting is what I call "Super Mouse!" If you move your mouse back and forth while clicking it, it selects everything in the current window, or the desktop. If you accidentally double-click then, you'd expect it to run everything on your desktop. They must have noticed that this would be very inconvenient - on my system it would run 65 different programs, including 43 games that want to take over the whole screen. So they put in a way to stop that: if you have more than 3 items selected and try to do anything, a dialog box pops up and asks: "Do you really want to do that to all 65 items?" This is a lifesaver on the desktop, as I mentioned. However, it soon becomes irritating if you are using a text editor. For instance, if you select a "large" area of text, such as more than 3 characters or more than three words, and want to delete it.

When I tried to fix this problem, I discovered there are seven (7) screens of configuration settings, and fixing this required changes on three (3) of those screens. But I was able to make it behave like a normal mouse, after only three or four tries.

My computer works fine now, except that the mound of super glue in the mouse port looks a bit odd. I'm saving my pennies to get a new computer. My sister still hasn't found a sucker to take her furry mouse. And Mom still thinks Dad and I were exaggerating about the mouse problems.

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