Friday, May 18, 2018

A long term mystery solved

It would happen sometimes that when using my work mobile computer, the mouse cursor would go absolutely wild at first, making it very difficult to control. This would often happen when I was trying to work on the train, early in the morning. I discovered that if I left the mouse to its own, it would calm down after a few minutes. At one stage this got so bad that I was sorely tempted to ask for a replacement computer. This happened some times but not every time.

Yesterday, I was randomly perusing the blog of Microsoft explainer in chief, Raymond Chen, when I came across a very old entry about how a computer mouse could sometimes lock up a computer. The moral of the story was not to connect a mouse to a running computer, especially a mobile computer, which has its own kind of mouse buttons as well as a track ball (that blue thing in the keyboard, sandwiched between g, h and b).

I realised that this described the problem which I was having with the mobile computer: if I connected the mouse to the computer before I turned it on, everything would be ok. The mouse would go wild if I connected it after the computer had already started running. As Raymond writes in one of the comments in that blog, the "wandering mouse-stick" is the stick recalibrating itself. If you touch the stick while it is recalibrating you are only making it worse. Just let it wander for a few seconds until it gets its bearings.

So now I know: connect the mouse before turning the computer on. This is a problem only on my work mobile, as I frequently turn it on and off; all my other computers stay on all the time.

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