How to Clean & Fix a Mouse

Video Transcript

"You know, there have been some innovations in Mouse market lately, mainly being optical. I know some of you at home still have a ball mouse but either which way, you gotta clean it. My name's James, computer hardware training coordinator for Interconnection, and I'm going to show you how to clean and fix your mouse. Now a ball mouse differs from optical mouse in that it has a ball. This causes some inherent problems. One, is as you're moving it around the mouse pad, all the dust and such can get brought up in to there, and cause interference with the computer seeing the movement of the ball, which is how the computer knows how the mouse is moving. To clean these mice, it's rather simple. You have these two little marks right here, and all you do is you rotate it, and then falls right out. As you can see here, there's a little bit of dust on here, nothing too bad. But we still might want to clean this mouse. So what we do is we take a nice cloth. Sometimes I like to use a little rubbing alcohol on here just to make sure every thing's very clean. And I'll go in here, swab it all out until the inside of it looks pretty nice and clean. Another thing to keep in mind is you want to clean the actual ball. Get all that dust off, all the lint from your mouse pad and everything else. The main thing you're cleaning in your mouse are these rollers right here. What these rollers do is they roll, as the name sits, with the ball, giving it an x and a y access. This let's it know where it is in relation to the mouse pad and if you're moving it left, right, up, down or anything in between. This is primarily what you want to clean. You want to make sure there's no build up on here. I can see we have a little build up right there. You want to make sure you get all that off. This all can give your mouse a little better response and just overall better computer experience. To do this, use your cloth. You might want to roll it up a little bit to get in there. Just get all that off there. So, you want to get the dust off from each roller. Once you do this one you move on to the next one. Once the mouse is all clean, you simply reassemble it. To do this, make sure every thing's nice an clean. Once you're satisfied with how clean it is, insert the ball, put the plate back over, make sure the plate sits flush, rotate the plate, plate should be in firmly, and now your mouse is ready to go."