For the last few years, I've owned a couple of different optical mice. I started with a Logitech mouse and recently switched to a Microsoft mouse (Wireless Laser Mouse 6000). During the time I've owned these mice I've been frustrated by how they would jump around from time to time. In the old days, I knew that to fix a standard mouse, you'd simply open the undercarriage, pop out the little ball, and scrape the crap off the rollers that accumulates over time. Voila! Your mouse would run like new. But there's no moving parts on the optical mouse, and it sure looked clean to me. Invariably when my optical mouse would start to act up, I'd start switching surfaces, which sometimes seemed to help for awhile, but nothing really solved my problem, and I was about to go back to using a wired mouse. Well, I feel pretty stupid, because I figured out how to fix the damn thing this morning. A bit of googling lead me to an article which said that sometimes a little hair (or a piece of dust, I'd imagine) gets trapped in with the optical sensor. The solution? Blow out the little hole where the optical sensor lies. A quick puff of air cleared up my problem. Tada, new mouse. God I feel stupid. I think later today I'll pick up a dark, nonreflective mousepad to use, since this seems to be the recommended surface.
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