Sunday, March 2, 2008

How to clean a mighty mouse scroll ball

I really like Apple's new-ish wireless mighty mouse, but I do have occasional problems with the scroll ball not wanting to scroll. Apparently, after reading around the internet, the insides of the scrolling mechanism can get extremely dirty and stop working. Searching around on how to fix the problem gave all kinds of ideas, from just turning the thing upside down and blowing, to actually taking it apart and gluing it back together (you're not supposed to take an Apple mouse apart, so it's mostly impossible to do without breaking). Well, nothing that I tried worked, and I wasn't willing to break the thing for a scroll ball, but I finally found a solution that works...and works very quickly!

All you need is one of those lint rollers with the sticky tape. Hold the mouse upside down, roll the ball on the tape for about 10 seconds, and try scrolling again. Now, my scroll ball looks much cleaner than it did and it's scrolling at least as well as it did when it came out of the box.

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