Educational Value of a Dead Mouse
Alistair Owens www.keen2learn.co.uk
My mouse died recently. A valued friend who gave loyal support through good and bad days. We had grown much attached. But as with us all it had grown old and lost it’s ability to left click. It needed replacing, and my knowledge and technical education took a massive step forward as a result.
The old mouse was a wireless optical device which flashed red to give a reassuring indication it was working. The new one is laser based and has a tiny green run light underneath on its belly which you can’t see. The science involved is astounding and it’s all contained in the operating software.
Stuff the CD in the drive, a few clicks on the on-board synaptic touch pad (which by the way seems to have taken a long term dislike of the capacitance of my fingers and plays silly beggars with the simplest of instructions) and bingo a new mouse with a multitude of additional features. But the new boy didn’t last long. Four days later it too died. A terminal case of the jiggling images. You can scroll but you can’t stop still. Seemed the impatient little blighter continuously wanted to move on. We reached an impasse in our relationship.
The shop swapped the wee beast and advised to remove the software and reload it. If only I had known. To cut a long story short and avoid the awful wailing noise said to come from my direction, removing the software was OK right up to the point of the pop-up which advised that all the gobbledygook had not been removed, so there! Undaunted, I reloaded the software. My old mate the synaptic pad playing silly devils throughout in a fit of pique reacting I think to the thought another pointing device was about to come online.
The software CD drive hummed, clicked its fingers and stopped. Anther pop-up; Found some old files still on the system and decided to stop loading. Total impasse. A couple of hours of fiddling; you loose all sense of time when using a computer, I had exhausted all the hints, tricks and Microsoft advise and phoned the supplier tech help. “Try this, now that and now the other†came the instructions over the phone. OK when you know roughly what you are doing, traumatic when you don’t. Hours passed, grey hairs appeared. The synaptic pad still had the upper hand, smug beggar.
Files were sought and deleted, operating systems visited, start up programs modified, temporary files exterminated. No luck. The phone support gave a final burst of “try these†and disappeared. Six hours had elapsed. I had lost the will to continue. The teaching resource on the help line has steered me through the minefield but had failed to hit the target. My education had been drastically extended as had the frustration.
Then out of the blue delving through the logic as if in some science games I found a small insignificant file which had the name of the mouse supplier. As in the cleaning advert “Bang and the dirt was gone.†The software reloaded, the mouse sprang out of its box and the smug look from the synaptic pad faded. F9 was never so sweet (turns the touch pad off in case you are wondering).
And the moral; always care for your mouse, it may be small but it can give you a very nasty bite.
