Erratic mouse behavior in Yosemite

I'm trying to figure out why my mother's mouse is working so poorly on her Mac Mini. When she just tries to highlight a passage, the highlight will do any number of things, from disappearing completely, to jumping the selection around in the passage, to weirdly dragging portions of text out of place (this is, of course, the most annoying behavior).

I can't tell why this is happening. Any ideas? The mouse is a Logitec Performance MX.

Does it also sometimes register a double click when she means to single click?

I have a few different Logitech mice, all of the same model (Logitech Anywhere Mouse MX), and all of them developed noisy primary buttons after a few months.

The symptom was that any time you clicked the button it would randomly be a quick sequence of a random number of clicks. And if you were holding down the button for a drag operation (such as selecting text) it would randomly act like you had quickly released and then re-held the button at random points during the drag operation. That could easily explain the behavior you were seeing.

Other than a new mouse, my fix was to actually desolder the buttons from the pcb, dismantle them carefully, scrape the contacts clean, reassemble and resolder. Found an instructional page online of a guy doing it to his Logitech mouse.

And if the mouse is wireless or Bluetooth, try the same operations closer to the receiver. See if it's just a range thing.

I have a Logitec MX Master, it performed poorly when I tried to use it on Bluetooth with my MacBook (which to be honest is what I've come to expect from Bluetooth over the years). It didn't behave as badly as that, but was laggy enough to be annoying.

It works very well with the supplied dongle.

The more that I read your description, the more that I believe that this is indeed a problem with the switch. When you drag to select a passage, if the button switch is intermittent, then it will indeed select random selections of the passage, and will randomly reposition text if you are working in an app that has drag-n-drop text editing enabled. Your symptoms sound completely consistent with a noisy button.

On my mice I fully desoldered the switches, disassembled the switches, cleaned the contacts, and reassembled and resoldered the switches.

Here is a youtube video where the guy is doing it without the desoldering step, on what I believe to be the same model that you said your mom had:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82z-OpHdBgE

Of course, the other, easier option: Get a new mouse.

Only speculating here, but perhaps the local wildlife including the mice are a little more erratic due to the severe drought California has been experiencing. May be sadly taking it's toll on the smallest of critters in Yosemite as well as the larger ones.

I don't think that's the case, but I'm not sure there's many cases where she would notice this specifically.


I think this is probably what's going on. Thanks for the info. The mouse isn't new but isn't super old either. Might be time for a new one.


Bluetooth might just be my least favorite technology ever invented. I don't believe I've ever experienced a rock-solid bluetooth connection in a history of owning dozens of bluetooth products. Something always goes wrong, from small annoyances like the play/pause button on my headphones won't register on my phone every time, to just complete failures.

I know it's a YMMV situation, but I've never once had a problem with RF mice, yet the two times I've used bluetooth mice they've been a nightmare.

Sorry for the rant


Yeah, thanks for the tips, but it's probably time for a new one anyway.


Haha! Good one

The only things I use Bluetooth for are a thermometer set, the cell phone to car connection, and the console controllers. I really don't have a problem with those (well, with the newest version of the thermometers, the original design would lose connection in my bedroom, which made overnight smoking a pain).

Other than those, I actively avoid anything requiring Bluetooth. My brother thinks I'm turning into a Luddite though, simply because I still don't have a smart phone.

Random story: my wife's parents have an aging iMac and were having weird problems. I had a phone call with them where I was trying to figure it out and the ultimate conclusion was that their mouse (Apple-branded, wired) wasn't registering clicks any more. Thankfully, the fix was cheap.

The current fun: they've got an Apple Airport Extreme that I helped set up for them. Somehow, we never managed to write down the WiFi password, they've forgotten it, and now need to set up a new device. But their computer is too old to run a new-enough version of OS X to run the current Airport Utility with which to fix the Airport Extreme. (I had set it up with my laptop while visiting.)

So... it's going to require a trip to the Genius Bar. Or something like that.

I'm tempted to have them buy the new Google router. That might make their lives a good bit easier since it's very much engineered around being very, very simple to operate.

That "google" (actually TP-Link) router looks like a potential power hog: 3A@12V. Mind you, with a USB3 port not actually in-use, the baseline power consumption is more likely to be between 10W and 20W, but that's still not exactly eco-friendly.

TP-Link does have a smaller, cheaper ($12 vs $200) router that uses less than 2W power..

Cheers

Check your laptop keychain, Airport Utility will store a copy of the password of the network you configured in there.

**edit** Also check their Mac's keychain for the network password. It's in there and retrievable if their Mac ever joined the wireless part of the network.

I love those little blue travel routers! (I assume that's what you're talking about) I use them all the time to troubleshoot WiFi issues, or to turn wired-only devices into wireless clients. They're perfect for that. My favorite part is that they can be run off powered USB ports (they use a standard micro USB cable), so sometimes I can power the router off the device I'm trying to connect to the wireless network. Too cool.

My guess is that the power consumption of the OnHub is a mix of the much more elaborate antenna array and the other stuff Google has planned for it, including Zigbee and Brillo, as well as the rumor that it might run Android in the future.

After posting this, I thought "did I give Bluetooth on this mouse enough of a chance, after all I gave up three minutes after enabling Bluetooth, maybe I should try again". It certainly would be useful to be able to use Bluetooth and leave the dongle on the shelf.

So I did, I've been using Bluetooth for the last couple of days. Initially it was fine, couldn't really tell a difference between it and the dongle connection. But today it is back to its bad old behaviour, laggy so that the pointer doesn't track 100% smoothly across the screen.

I suspect less picky users would never notice (like those people who couldn't spot flickering CRTs and never cleaned their mouse balls). But it is horrible to use when it starts lagging. So, I'm back to the lag free dongle again.

My first thought was that it was probably carrying the plague and to avoid it and its droppings.

Slight hijack: You should look at the TL-WR703N rather than the TL-WR702N. The 703 has more flash and RAM and therefore can run OpenWRT:
http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wr702n
http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wr703n

Edit: the 703 doesn't seem to be a current model on their website any more though.

Thanks for the tip! Unfortunately it doesn't look like the 703 has much of a presence on Amazon yet. That's ok, though. For the situations where I use this thing, I wouldn't need OpenWRT.

I think actually the 703 might be the old model and as a result of cost cutting the 702 was created and since it was different enough they gave it a new number. The OS also changed to VxWorks from Linux. Similar to how the old WRT54G went. Looking at PCBs they are essentially identical too - just the RAM and flash was reduced and the USB host port was removed.

I'm not overly experienced about the history - but had been looking at them recently.

Also I see there's a TL-WR802N which is 300MBit Wireless N in the same form factor.

Nobody's mentioned this, as far as I can tell: have you changed the batteries? Whenever my wireless mouse (Logitech M525) starts acting up, it's because the batteries need replacing.

Haha, yes, the batteries were changed. It's a rechargeable mouse, so it shouldn't be an issue, but just to be sure we put another rechargeable battery in there and the problem is still there. I think a new mouse is needed.

I was thinking more of a very simple home router (which I use as a pure AP rather than router), the 720N.
http://www.tp-link.com/lk/products/details/cat-9_TL-WR720N.html
(I only have experience with the V1 [internal antenna], not the V2 [external antenna]).