This year, my mouse is on the fritz. It’s the worst kind of problem where the mouse ‘drifts’ on its own while idle. I don't know if it's divine intervention - No, don't click there on that evil spot - or whether my magnetic personality is getting in the way <g>. 

I point the mouse and start typing and as I’m typing the mouse cursor sometimes decides to drift to one or the other corner of the screen. Only sometimes though. Even more fun – especially for presentations – is the mouse moving while you’re trying to point at something. <g> So you try to click on something only to find that the mouse has quietly moved off the button or highlight point and you’re now clicking on dead air. This reminds me of Whil Hentzen’s User Hostile User Interfaces presentations from years gone which is always a crowd pleaser. <g> This excercise is especially fun for ASP.NET presentations when you're using the visual editor where mouse control isn't everything it could be in the first place...

This seems like an issue with the touch pad, but actually I’m not quite sure. It’s too inconsistent in its ways. Sometimes the drift is up, sometimes down. And it always neatly goes into the corners - bottom left or top right. Further it only seems to be a problem when I’m using both the internal keyboard and the touch pad of the mouse together and the drift seems to start only while I'm typing on the built in keyboard. In fact typing on the keyboard I can see the mouse cursor move. The mouse cursor races to the bottom of the screen and all the way into the far corner and then stays just at the edge.

So now I tried to turn off the touchpad and just use an external mouse, which didn’t work. Well, ok it does after about 3 tries I realized that an attached USB mouse counts as a ‘serial’ mouse not as a PS/2 mouse. This Dell Inspiron doesn’t have a PS/2 port, but I assumed that the mouse would be a PS/2 simulation (since you can plug the USB mouse into a PS/2 port with an adapter.

That sucks though. Having a little problem like this is a major PITA. It’ll be too expensive to get this fixed for this 3+ year old machine, yet the machine is otherwise adequate for my needs. I’ve been tossing around the idea of buying a new laptop for a while, but always came back to the point that it’s really not all that worth it to get a new one. There’s simply not enough performance gain to be had, especially since I’ve added a fair amount of new stuff to this machine (faster larger hard-disk, 1.5 gig memory etc).

Only when you’re traveling do things like this happen… Murphy loves me!