I rescind my positive rating of a mouse and wrestle to make my mouse work, and just before I loose my mind, I solve the problem. And discover that I should have guessed the cause . . .
Welcome to the new, improved online Gearhead! We’ve got lots more room so stretch out, relax and feel the joy that is Gearhead . . . ahhhh.
OK, so four weeks ago I discussed a mouse, the Saitek Obsidian Wireless Rechargeable Mouse, which I’d tested and on first pass found to be pretty cool. The following week, after 10 days of continuous use, I was less enthusiastic because of its overly sensitive touch, sensitive automatic scroll lock feature and badly placed side buttons. Now, after almost a month of use, I have replaced the Obsidian and plan to never use it again.
Why, you may ask? Simple, dear reader: The Obsidian is too sensitive, and I am too clumsy to live with it. Every time I tried to scroll, the automatic scroll lock on the Obsidian engaged. As I was almost never prepared for this, I’d move the mouse with gusto and find the page scrolling wildly, both vertically and horizontally. And I’d always catch the side buttons just when I didn’t mean to.
As these buttons trigger Web page backward and forward, I’d wind up loading some humungous page that I wanted to read, catch the front go-back button and end up cursing at the previous page. So I’d hit the other button to go back to page I wanted, start scrolling down, engage the autolock by accident and start cursing all over again.
Bottom line: the Saitek Obsidian is not recommended unless you have exceptional hand control. And this illustrates an important issue in the testing of products: There are many products you simply have to live with to find out whether they are really as good as they seem at first blush.
Over the years I’ve found a handful of products that were less — sometimes much less — than they first appeared. In many cases, I’d been using them for weeks or months before I got around to writing about them and, in some cases, I didn’t bother. There’s always a better product to cover, and with only my old Gearhead column length, there was never enough space.
So, having disconnected the Obsidian, I reconnected my old Microsoft Optical Mouse. Here’s where the insanity set in – the mouse moved and mouse-sensitive controls in applications indicated that they were getting “mouse-over” messages, but click and . . . nothing. “Mouse-down” events weren’t handed over to their targets. It was like something was blocking or swallowing up the mouse-down events.
I’d just disconnected the Obsidian, so it could have been a driver problem. I disabled and then re-enabled the mouse driver. No change. I tried updating the driver. No joy. Windows couldn’t find anything to update. I rebooted in case Windows needed to sort something out. Waste of time.
In desperation I uninstalled the mouse driver. I then tried to reinstall it, only to find that it was gone, apparently for good. So, I rebooted. When the PC came up, still no joy, so I fired up Firefox and went to Microsoft for a new driver.
Have you ever tried to navigate a Web site using only the keyboard? Not easy, and even harder when there are other applications – Net Snippets, in my case – that stay on top after they load at bootup until you dismiss them with the mouse . . . which, as you will recall in my case, wasn’t working.
Using a browser with only the keyboard isn’t really that hard; it is just tedious. It is the Web sites that make you want to stab someone. In the case of the Microsoft site, tabbing around the pages to find the right links was the browse from hell. There are so many links on every page, and it looks like each link is inside a
Moreover, in some bizarre twist of fate, every link I wanted was near the end of the page. I eventually started using shift-tab to navigate pages backward to save myself some time and effort.
To cut a long story slightly shorter, I eventually downloaded the Microsoft Intellipoint driver and installed it. I rebooted and . . .nothing. That was the last straw. The proverbial camel needed traction.
I disconnected the mouse and plugged in a Wacom Graphire Mouse/Pen pad that I bought ages ago (yes, I do have to buy some equipment).
Immediately, I had mouseability! While the mouse response was a little like trying to steer an out-of-control rocket (a little configuration was called for), mouse-downs worked again. After downloading the Graphire software, all was right in the digital garden.
On a whim I plugged the mouse into my laptop and voila! You may have guessed it: I found out that the Microsoft optical mouse had a faulty left-click button. Arggggh!
Should I have thought of this possibility? Maybe, but the mouse wasn’t that old, and I have much older mice that still work fine. Did any of the diagnostics detect this? No. All said everything was working fine.
Did the Microsoft troubleshooting system suggest this possibility? No. Apparently, it doesn’t think hardware can just stop working. Again, I find myself wondering what does John Q. Public do in a situation such as this — spend a fortune with their local PC wrangler? Buy a new PC? Start taking Prozac?
I think anonymous had it right when he/she said, “If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.”
