My new renegade mouse

[faster]

I have W98SE, 256MB RAM, and I just bought a new mouse - a PS2 port mouse, infrared.

I have never had to actually fight my cursor. Now I do. I was told it works best on a white surface, and found that out soon enough.

But it seems the cursor has a mind of its own. If I try to select a group of items in a game with a sweep of the cursor, it sometimes will not allow movement to the right, or if it does, it sails all the way to the far edge. Trying to reverse the sweep from right to left, only makes the problem do so leftward. Other times, the only movement it will accept at all is up or down. This doesn't happen all the time; just often. Online, it sails around sometimes, even when I'm not touching the mouse. I won't go into more gory details; the mouse acts renegade, okay?

So what might be the cause, and HOW can I find it and straighten things out? Has anyone else ever had this problem?

BTW, don't tell me to upgrade; I'm already working on it. But if my equipment might be the problem, please give me some details on how I can ferret it out for myself. I've found that some experts will just point to my system, blame it and not even try to find the real problem. This is just a mouse. It should work, even on my ancient equipment.

Thanks.

[gvm]

Just a few suggestions - you've probably tried at least some of them:

• Try different surfaces
• Try unplugging and re-plugging the mouse into the PS/2 socket (power off first)
• Try swapping the keyboard and mouse in the 2 PS/2 sockets (power off first again)
• Leaving the mouse stationary, try wiggling the cable between your fingers, all the way along its length (whilst powered on) - helps to find any breaks in the cable.
• Also try wiggling the PS/2 connector in the socket whilst powered on.
• If this is a wireless mouse, try putting the receiver right next to the mouse
• Again, if wireless, change the batteries for known (tested!) good ones.
• Check in the BIOS to see if there are different settings for "Mouse Type" - if so, try them all (regardless of what they're called - even if it's currently on "PS/2").
• If the manufacturer supplied a W98 driver - install it (only as a last measure!).

Good luck!

Afterthought: Another thing to consider is, if you didn't have a working PS/2 mouse in this system before, this could be an interrupt clash with another device. Shouldn't be an issue if you hade a PS/2 mouse before and haven't installed any new drivers.

[Rikky]

Laptop or desktop? Have you installed the mouse driver? Post the make and model of the mouse.

The symptoms your describing do sound like a laser problem,the surface has to be perfectly flat any bumps or ridges such as a leather arm can cause it to veer off as can textured surfaces such as carpet.

To ferret it out test a different mouse in your computer to see if its hardware related,try the laser mouse in another computer on the same surface to see if its a mouse problem,that's the first thing I'd try.

Welcome to the forum

EDIT Great post GVM