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Cleaning your balls poll

Did you ever own a mouse with ball.

  • Yes, my computer mice had balls

  • No, all I ever had were castrated pc mice with lasers,etc..

Results are only viewable after voting.
Hugo Drax

Hugo Drax

Diamond Member
Balls on computer mice. Who remembers the days of the older mouse technology where pc mice had a ball and you had to clean them on occasion.
 
I never owned a ball mouse, but I sure used plenty of them. I think I was one of three people in my entire school system that had ever heard of cleaning them, too.
 
Cleaned them often. Simpler version was removing dirt accumulated in a band on the black rollers in contact with the ball - I could do that simply by removing the ball and its retaining ring. Occasionally had to disassemble the mouse to clean dirt out of the little wheels with holes, and the optical light / sensor around them.
 
Mario_paint_box.jpg
 
the mouse I used up until last year had a ball in it, cleaned it whenever it started giving me problems, so not too often, never really a huge deal.
 
Yep, whenever the POS started skipping, I'd scrape the crap off the 3 wheels.

So happy when I got my first optical mouse... Wait, no I wasn't. My desk was reflective and the mouse occasionally went batshit crazy.

My laser G5 has been running well for the past... decade?
 
Something oddly comforting about holding mice balls in your hands.

...there really has got to be a better way to say that.
 
I used to steal the balls from school. Eventually I ended up with a box full of balls and the school had no balls... :|
 
Fucking shit did I ever hate doing that. Been through more years of that than I have used laser or optical mice so far. Sometimes progress does actually do something for humanity.

Fuck I even remember a few years of needing to load the OS first off a 5.25 floppy and then swap that out for another 5.25 floppy that had the game data on the disk.

Who remember Imation superdisks?
 
I have to clean two of them at work all the time. I have three on my desk and only one is optical. I am not allowed to connect my own equipment and there are no mousepads. They gum up quick.
 
Gross. I remember, and thank god those days are long gone. Mice with balls, dot matrix printers, god awful "off-white" colored computers, green screens and dialup internet. Not to mention Windows 3.1 / DOS 6.22 killer combo, anyone remember nibbles and gorillas? Best part of those nightmarish days of computing.
 
I would regularly would clean off accumulated hair, oils and particles from the balls after heavy use. I also found oiling them slightly improved performance.
 
Going optical was a huge leap forward in mouse tech. I personally kept mine nice and clean, but sometimes you'd have to use another person's mouse and that shit was dirty as hell and the cursor would be jumping all over the place.
 
Yes, I remember cleaning the little spinning needles with a paper clip because it wasn't smooth to game with when dirty. Those things got dirty like ASAP. Its almost like they put glue on them so they would double as a lint roller to clean your desk. Shitheads
 
I personally enjoyed it, akin to picking a scab or cleaning my ears that is both gross and satisfying. That said, I definitely prefer optical mice.
 
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