I have a normal wheel mouse at work and haven’t bothered to clean it since Michael Jackson had a fro. Whenever it felt sluggish I just increased the acceleration and sensitivity settings. Today I hit the last notch on acceleration and it still felt sluggish. It was like I was dragging my mouse through a bowl of cold oatmeal. Only then did the idea occur to me that dirt might be the cause. For some reason I never considered that possibility when it had lost its zippy feeling before. Increasing the acceleration got rid of that not so speedy feeling and I returned to mouse heaven with my problem solved.

Today, as I already mentioned, I maxed out the acceleration. I mean, I was flooring the pedal and bouncing off the rev limiter. I began to think that maybe I had grown so adept at using a mouse that I was too fast for my own good. I could probably out maneuver the fastest mouse in the west with one hand tied behind my back (preferably my non-mouse-using hand). Was I the Mario Andretti of mouse users? The short answer is no, I was not.

I opened the mouse to investigate and a large clump of dust fell out. It was so dusty I could have been growing potatoes in there. I cleaned it out, put it back together and then realized just how dirty it had been. My mouse shot across the screen like a crazed sparrow. I could move across all three virtual desktops with a quarter inch nudge of the mouse. In fact, my mouse was so sensitive that the cursor ended up on my coworkers monitor across from me. He was nice enough to return it. Now, if I so much as breathe on my mouse it will select six different windows at the same time and slide them around the screen. Needless to say, I’m back in mouse heaven.