The robustness of a trackball

Discussion in 'Miscellaneous' started by ShelLuser, Dec 2, 2017.

  1. Hi gang!

    My Logitech trackman marble ;)

    So yeah... A few weeks back disaster struck. After roughly 30 years of usage my trackball started to malfunction. Can you believe it? They sure don't make 'm like they used to ;)

    It began with weird "spasm" movements; I'd move the mouse upwards and suddenly, and for no apparent reason, it would jump back down to the lower left corner. This also had some very annoying affects on my Minecraft sessions (at one time it made me accidentally drop a lava bucket back into the lava instead of my shulker box :confused: (I know I should have used shift-click)).

    At first I blamed the drivers which could have become outdated (you never know what Microsoft is going to do in trying to persuade you to move from Windows 7 to Windows 10) but this week I finally realized the obvious. You see, after many years of usage a thing like this can become "a little" dirty :D

    Fortunately for me things were made to last back then, so it was relatively easy to open it up and sort it all out.

    And now, after it has been thoroughly cleaned, it's finally back in action. Good as new, no more spasm movements, I no longer need to increase the mouse speed to almost full and everything simply works as intended.

    Figured I'd share... Trackballs definitely take getting used to, but once you're used to it then you can enjoy full control in a very small space, you don't have to pick up your mouse every time you're trying to look around and most of all: they're made to last. Unlike a mouse a trackball is stationary, you normally don't move it around and therefor it also has much less strain on the cable or connectors.

    The only downside is that they're usually much more expensive than a mouse. When I bought this one (around 1990, I don't recall the actual date) I could have easily gotten 4 (non-optical) mice instead. However I decided to grab this thing, also because it was advertised as being optical, and well, the result can be seen now. It still works :)

    I'll bet Logitech would rather have seen that it b0rk down so that I had to buy a new one, but c'est la vie ;)

    SO yah, if you're in need for something else. Maybe food for thought?