Number 197 - October 1999

The Mouse That Poured
by Bob Thomson, Tacoma Open Group for Microcomputers
Taking a break from computing with my new Pentium III-Win98 computer I went and got myself a cup of coffee--with, thankfully, no sugar. When I returned to the computer with my coffee, I managed to spill it directly on the mouse--and I mean a lot of coffee. In the ensuing panic of trying to shake the coffee out of the mouse and cleaning up around the desk with paper towels, the mouse pointer was darting all over the screen and in spite of all efforts to clean things up the mouse now seemed to be inoperable.     I took the ball out of the mouse and dried the inside as best I could, waited a while, then rebooted the computer. When Windows 98 finally loaded, the mouse was dead. No action at all. "Oh-oh," I thought. "I have probably shorted out some circuits and fried something. I hope it's just the mouse and not the motherboard!" Have you ever tried to navigate in Windows 9x from the git-go without the mouse? It ain't easy. Maybe it can be done if you know how and are up on your keyboard equivalents, but for most of us--NOT!     I called Dick Fairchild at Computer Parts Unlimited/Groupware, who had built my computer, and he suggested that I go and get another mouse, which I did. The new mouse wouldn't work either. Yikes! Did I need a new motherboard? I called Dick again and arranged to meet him at the shop. I took my CPU, the new mouse and my keyboard but left the monitor at home. Dick said to bring just the CPU and new mouse into the shop, which I did. He set up the system using a shop monitor and keyboard. When Windows 98 loaded he tried to get the Start Menu to come up but was having trouble doing it, so I went and got my keyboard which has the so-called WinKey on it. That's the key with the Windows logo on it. Pressing that key brought up the Start Menu. [On a keyboard without the WinKey you normally press the	TAB key until you see the Start key become active (a dotted rectangle appears on the screen representation of the Start key) then press Enter and the Start Menu comes up.] Navigating With the Keyboard     Using the arrow keys Dick navigated up the Start Menu to Settings, pressed the Enter key and got the following choices:     Control Panel     Printers     Task Bar & Start Menu     Folder Options     Active Desktop     Selecting Control Panel and pressing Enter brought up the Control Panel window. Pressing the TAB key selected (highlighted) the first icon in the Control Panel window. Using the Arrow keys, he navigated to the System icon and pressed Enter. With the arrow keys he navigated to Device Manager and pressed Enter again. The list of system components was displayed.     He deleted the MOUSE selection and restarted the system. On start up, the system Power On System Test (POST) procedure detected that the mouse was not selected and the driver was not active so went into its Plug and Play routine, searched for it, found it and re-installed it. When Win 98 finally loaded the mouse was active again and all was right with the world.     Apparently when all that frantic activity was going on trying to dry out the mouse, the system, in its wisdom, said "Something's wrong here!" and simply disabled the mouse circuit so no further harm would come to the system. That's why even the new mouse wouldn't work. With the mouse circuit re-established, I re-installed the original (now dry) mouse and it worked fine too.
Number 197 - October 1999