No, not a dodgy version of that (old) cartoon. Just going to post something useful actually. Might be good to redeem myself from my blogging lethargy.

Last time in Portugal, my friend Claudia (do João Alegre) had her Apple mouse scrollwheel (or sphere or whatever) not scrolling down. Only down. Nothing you can’t survive without, but very annoying. It happens that my mouse at work started doing the same a few weeks ago (no scroll-down). Scrolling up, left and right was fine. So I just swapped it with the office lounge one (both wireless). One week after that, my wired one at home (on the brand new iMac) just started doing the same so I replaced with the wireless one I have by the sofa (with the wireless apple keyboard, for my lazy-ass couch surfing). Guess what? Started doing the same after a while. Quick research and I found the simplest of solutions:

1 - Grab a clean sheet of A4 paper.

2 - Put the mouse upside down and roll (pressing the scrollwheel) against the paper up-down some 15 or more times.

3 - Do it also sideways once in a while.

4 - LOTS of crap will probably come out from under the scrollwheel. In some cases not a lot, but it just worked fine after that.

I just fixed all the mice at home plus the one at work this morning :)

By the way, my house recently became Windows-free. I got rid of my last PC/Windows machine after spending an(other) entire day plus another afternoon trying to solve typical driver / random crash issues. I am not an impatient windows user, I am actually a tech / geek guy and I swear almost threw the PC out of the window (but ended up donating it to an ONG like last one). I just got tired of being 40% user and 60% technician in order to be able to use an OS and decided to replace it with an iMac, working flawlessly now as my media center (using PLEX) and general home computer. Funny how a die-hard Windows user (almost anti-mac) like me tried one mac (MacBookPro at work) and quickly got rid of all Windows machines within one year. Even funnier, while working in advertising / design at Young & Rubicam I was the only guy who worked on a PC and now as a developer in a finance company, I use a Mac.

So, also, OFFICIALLY (to all friends and family and random people nagging all me about it), I am not fixing and wasting time on ANY single Windows machine anymore. Not even feel like wasting time talking about fixes and workarounds. I don’t want to hear about Spyware, Viruses, random crashes every 2 hours, on startup, drivers (and the list goes on as you know…). A piece of advice: unless time is not money for you, start wasting your time fixing Windows issues and invest in a Mac. One thing is for sure, you’ll spend your time working or using it instead of trying to make it work!

This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 11:42 and is filed under Gadgets, Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.