[techtalk] dead mouse

[JamesA.Sutherland]

On Fri, 22 Jun 2001 23:40:57 -0500, you wrote:

>David Merrill wrote:
>> 
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> My mouse suddenly died on me. Occasionally I can get it to move, but
>> then it moves jerkily and coasts to the side of the screen. All 3
>> buttons still work. I've tried two other meeces which both do the same
>> thing, which afaics rules out the mouse itself.
>> 
>> I haven't done anything at all with any conf files.
>> 
>> Does anyone have any suggestions on what might be wrong, or how I
>> might go about debugging this?
>
>Were I a betting woman (which I am ...) I'd guess that the
>mouse plug or something hardware inside the box is busted.
>
>Mice have two direction sensors -- one X and another Y and
>those thingies, when they break, give you movement on one
>axis only. 

Yep...

> My recollection is that the X and Y signals are
>on two different wires,

Not to the PC they aren't - at least, not with serial, PS/2 and USB
mice. It's just a serial stream of relative coordinates and button
status. Acorn's proprietary mice used to do this, IIRC - what kind of
mouse is it?

> so since the problem is mouse
>idependent, my guess would be that the problem is on the
>other side of the mouse/computer interface ...

I'd agree the problem is the PC side of things, but I doubt it's
hardware. More likely to be a driver problem: you get very similar
results if you have the wrong mouse type configured, since the driver
then interprets the coordinates the mouse sends wrongly...

>-- Julie (US Patent #5,963,195)


James.