I just got a cool new mouse with a wheel in the middle and it works great. But one thing some time when I am in Excel and try to highlight areas to delete or insert, the mouse starts jumping. I highlight the area and then right click. Sometimes it takes it. Othertimes it starts jumping three or four spaces. Then it jumps back and forth. Any idea what I am doing to it.
Perhaps you have…** A Kangaroo Mouse! ** hahahahahahaha
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Again, I’m sorry, but you knew it was coming.
Be sure you have a driver for the operating system & check the mouse properties in control panel to see if they look okay.
The number one cause of a mouse jumping like that is a hair caught in the mechanism. Turn your mouse over and open the cover that holds in the ball. Look for any hair that may have gotten caught. Also clean the rollers (a little Windex sprayed on a paper towel does wonders – don’t spray it at the mouse).
Your mouse may jump when your PC is engaged doing something else…specifically reading from the harddrive. Your computer buffers (a kind of short-term memory) signals from input devices when it’s busy handling other things. When it is done with that task it takes all of the mouse movements you input and executes then immediately. What you see on the screen is the mouse skipping around. You can also sometimes see this effect when using the keyboard. I.e. You type something and nothing shows for a few seconds and then ‘zip’…the whole line you just typed appears.
Look or listen for harddrive activity when you do the procedure you mentioned. Wait for the harddrive to settle down and try again…mouse should work fine.
BTW…Fixes for this can include more memory (the PC can load more instructions into the memory rather than going to the harddrive everytime something ‘new’ comes along) and/or a faster computer but you never get rid of this entirely.
It just occurred to me that there are cheaper fixes than adding memory or buying a faster computer. While extra memory can help it may not do the whole trick. A faster CPU is of limited use since chances are your harddrive is the limiting factor unless you have a REALLY slow CPU.
Try freeing up space and defragging your harddrive. You should have a minimum of 100MB free…250MB is better and 500MB or more is ideal.
Assuming you’re using a MS operating system your computer uses something called Virtual Memory…also called a Swap File. Basically virtual memory is nothing more than your PC blocking off some of your harddrive and ‘pretending’ that that space is the same a regular memory (RAM). The upside to this is your PC can manage to run applications that may require far beyond what you have installed a physical RAM in your system. The downside is it’s MUCH slower (about 1,000 times slower) than physical RAM. The Swap File moniker comes in because your PC ‘swaps’ info from system RAM to the Virtual Memory as needed.
When your PC gets low on disk space the maximum size of the Swap File shrinks. If your computer needs more memory than the total of your RAM + Virtual Memory then it has to write what it considers old data back to the drive, write new stuff to memory and move ‘semi-old’ stuff in memory back to the Swap File. In the PC support world we call this ‘thrashing the harddrive’ as becomes apparent if you watch the harddrive activity. In bad cases it seems the harddrive never ceases activity.
‘Low on disk space’ is only part of the picture. The Swap File has to be contiguous meaning it can only be as large as the largest SINGLE open area on your drive. This is where defragmenting comes in. If all you have is 100MB free on your harddrive but it is fragmented the largest single, consecutive open block of space may be rather small. When you defragment all your data gets shoved to one end of the disk leaving 100MB free (open space) at the other end. Unfortunately fragmentation occurs pretty much every time you boot your PC so if all you have is 100MB free you need to stay on top of the defragmenting bit (maybe once per 1-2 weeks).
If you have 250MB free there is less cause to watch your fragmentation (maybe once per month) and over 500MB free you can somewhat forget about it altogether (mayber defrag once every 6 months).
Note the above are very loose rules of thumb. I have plenty of free space on my PC but I’m constantly installing and uninstalling software meaning fragmentation occurs much more quickly for me so I have to keep a closer eye on it than most ‘normal’ users do.
Still, this should be a ‘cheap’ way for you to improve your overall performance without spending money. It won’t perform miracles but it can’t hurt.
You didn’t mention if it was wireless, so it’s probably not. But I had that problem with my wireless mouse when it was too far away from the receiver.
Occams razor would say to visit microsoft.com & search the knowledge base…
Occam’s razor would also suggest they’ve tried that, it is afterall a double sided razor.
I’ve tried the various settings. It seems (so far) to only happen when I am in Excel. It only happens when I right click so I’m assuming it is a setting though I can’t figure it out.