am I getting old (lead fingered), or have my mice been taking steroids

Claude Jones claude_jones at levitjames.com
Thu Mar 23 19:02:06 UTC 2006


On Thursday 23 March 2006 07:55, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Wednesday 22 March 2006 22:04, Claude Jones wrote:
> >OK - with a subject line like that, this is going to be a
> > letdown. On two separate FC4 machines, my mice have suddenly
> > acquired deep sensivity - no, they aren't crying every time I
> > click, but they are taking single clicks and treating them as
> > double. I'm skimming mail, for instance, and I click on the
> > next message arrow, and two messages are marked read and the
> > third message gets displayed. If I click on a message in the
> > list to see it in the reading pane, it opens up its own
> > window. Doesn't happen every time, but, it's happening with
> > increasing frequency - like many times a day. I tried playing
> > with the KDE (I'm running KDE-Redhat) sensitivity setting,
> > but it didn't seem to help.
>
> This is a classic case of poor assembly when the mouse was
> built.  If you open it up, you will probably find cracked
> solder joints on the legs of the microswitches caused by the
> switch not being fully seated in the board when it was soldered
> originally.  So the leg pushes the joint away from the board on
> the down stroke, eventually breaking the glue bond of the
> copper to the board, and eventually the edges of the joint will
> fail from flexion.  Visible with a magnifying glass quite
> easily.  You get one click when the switch clicks, you get an
> up event when the cracked joint opens as your finger goes on
> down, the a new click when the joint comes back together on the
> release, followed by an up event when the switch itself finally
> clicks open.  Hold the switch down solidly into the board while
> resoldering each leg, applying fresh solder and it should be
> fixed for a while, but the real fix is a new mouse.
>

Well, I'm a tinkerer, myself. It would sound plausible except for 
its having started on two separate machines at the same time. 
Another clue is that the symptoms aren't manifesting on the 
machine I'm typing this message, right now. This is a brand new 
FC5 installation on the same KVM as my FC4 box. On this machine, 
I haven't noticed any oversensitized mouse behavior, yet, though 
it's using the same mouse as my FC4 box... I tried turning down 
the double-click interval to a very slow setting on my home box 
this am, and things seemed to improve. If that doesn't bear out, 
I'll just try a new mouse...

Now, I was just thinking about this issue a moment ago, as I was 
preparing some lunch in my microwave at work. It has a single 
button for a 30 sec full power blast - I stuck my food in, pushed 
the button, and heard a double-beep - needless to say, when I 
looked at the timer display, it was counting down from 1 minute, 
NOT 30 sec - maybe my subject line is not so far-fetched ;-)

-- 
Claude Jones
Bluemont, VA, USA




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