The image doesn’t show the fingernail scrape technique on the wheels that the ball drives. That cotton swap isn’t going to get that off you need some elbow grease and a fingernail!
Satisfying and gross at the same time.
Actually using a standard cheap mouse on a desk without a mousepad will generate the same crap along the pads, it doesn’t come off so crisply but reminds me of this every time.
Any fingernail?
Preferably a toenail.
I do. When modern mouses stop working, I feel useless.
These worked on glass. Almost nothing today works on a glass table but these did
I use a thumb-trackball (and have since the 90s). They work on glass. Hell, they work on my lap or beside me if I’m in bed. And no space needed to move around.
Every week or two I pop the ball out and give it a quick wipe with a lenscloth.
Preach the good word, partner
I used these religiously until the carpal tunnel from phone scrolling set in
Are you an adult by night?
I love my thumb-trackball. Doesn’t matter where I use it, it will always work.
This comment made me curious so I tested the two mice I use regularly.
My Logitech G502 tracks very poorly on glass and is basically unusable.
My MX Anywhere 2S lives up to its name and seems to track perfectly fine.
I use a mouse pad, it works pretty well.
I have a “magic trackpad” from apple on a side table to use when I’m watching or reading something and recline too much to reach the mouse.
It’s nice (and with some free driver I found can do multi touch on windows), but for some reason it had a battery (despite having a fixed usb cable) which pillowed up making it unusable until I literally ripped it off (damn thing had more glue than battery).
Obviously works fine without the battery, which I assume is just an attempt at extremely inefficient planned obsolescence, but I wouldn’t recommend it, too much of a fire hazard if you don’t notice the trap.
At least you know wired mice won’t blow your hand up, and I value that more than the convenience.
When I have to lower myself to the filthy gutter of having to use the mouse at all, I feel like an itchy scrotum in need of a lye bath.
keyboard master race
Cat hair, dog hair and crumbs.
One old tech thing I don’t miss.
People actually washed that ball?
With soap and stuff?
I just used my nail to clean the roller things inside the ball area, and then put it back together. Never had a problem.
These people were fancy.
I used to work in an office with shared desks. I remember one woman came in with a basin of soapy water and a toothbrush, and took the mouse ball out and washed it. Then she pried off every key on the keyboard and scrubbed them too. Under the keys was a thick layer of beard hair and crumbs. Boak.
Did anyone actually clean their mice like this?
Id get in there with my child fingers and scratch the wad of gunk off. Usually id end up wedging it in the housing but thats my dad’s problem.
Yeah, you kinda had to at a certain point, the gunk would inhibit the ball from rolling freely.
There was always a kind of lint that would develop on the wheel inside. I’ve got no idea what it was made out of.
Usually just actual lint and dust. You’d have to kinda crack break it off then sprinkle it on the floor or blow it into the air on your friend sitting next to you.
Or make a secret ball collection and the school would panic.
I remember cleaning the ball once or twice, yes, when it got too bad to ignore.
Mostly the gunk accumulated on the rollers, though (and under the mouse, like in optical ones), and that was easier and faster to just scratch off with your nail… except for the little third wheel (seen on the bottom left picture) that kept the ball centered, of course, because that one wasn’t only smaller but on a spring, making it almost impossible to scratch the gunk off of.
There was also the occasional hair tangled up on a roller, of course, which was almost impossible to remove. Those you just pushed aside onto the roller’s axle and hoped the mouse would die of some electrical failure before the poor thing got too full of hair to roll.
Yes.
Only reason I stopped using a ballouse is mine just broke
What? No velcro mouse ball to clean the wheels?
I removed the puppy grime sick with dust and dog hair from the rollers rather often.
Fuck it, we ball
You’re chipping hand cheese off the rollers on the top and the side, or today when you need to do the same to the rolly third/middle mouse button. It’s the same thing!
Those sucked
I mean they beat the old arrow keys (wasd hadn’t been invented yet), and were better than most joysticks of the time…
I have this, for obvious reasons i can’t link it but i have one.
I would go back to that mouse right now. My current mouse doesn’t work on windows because windows hates us. My cursor jumps a half an inch when randomly on certain things i click on. It’s a known issue with no solution from microsoft.
I bet an analog mouse with basic drivers would work just fine.
You can in a way. I use a trackball mouse. Cleans about the same, nostalgic every time. Plus my wrist doesn’t hurt anymore.
Holy frick what mouse do you have?
I have provisioned hundreds of different mice over the decades and never had anything nearly that bad, and that’s including the gen 1 optical mice.
It’s a windows issue, not the mouse. Every mouse has the same issue. My mouse works fine on linux.
I second rumba’s experience. Your problem is very strange
Eh, these also used to jump all over the place once you got too much gunk or hair on the rollers, and were orders of magnitude slower and less precise.
I wouldn’t go back unless I was forced to work on a glass table, and I hear there are some optical mice that can work on glass now, so probably not even then.
Eww…is that Saurons eye?
No, his ball.
