CORDLESS DEVICES CAN STILL GET TANGLED

It all began with my cordless mouse. Specifically I have been using the Logitech MX Revolution cordless mouse for almost a year now and I've never been happier with it. Its best feature is the weighted scroll wheel that lets you literally fly through pages of documents with ease. And its tracking is smooth and exquisitely responsive. But then one day the mouse cursor got stuck.

When I say that it got stuck, I mean for a brief moment, the little pointer arrow on the screen didn't move even though I was moving the mouse.

Normally the mouse pointer moves in the corresponding direction and speed of the mouse. However the sticking was only momentary so I didn't think much about it. Things were moving smoothly along and then it happened again and again and it was getting worse each time it happened. Typically the sticking mouse culprit is some kind of foreign object blocking the sensor underneath the mouse that detects that it is being moved. In the olden days when most mice used a little rubber ball to track its movement, you would remove the ball and check the little wheels inside to see if dust and dirt buildup was preventing the wheels from turning. Nowadays, most mice are optical so I inspected its little window to see if anything was blocking the laser light from seeing the desk's surface. There was nothing but I cleaned it with a can of pressurized air anyway. The cursor continued to intermittently stick.

Low batteries can also cause this symptom but since this mouse uses rechargeable batteries and the indicator on the mouse showed a full charge, that wasn't it. Since the hardware seems to be working, I next focused on the software. Perhaps a component of the driver software had become corrupted so I uninstalled and reinstalled all of it. The cursor was still sticking. So finally I figured that the only thing left was to completely replace the mouse and its little USB receiver. Fortunately, I happened to have another MX mouse on hand and I was sure that this would fix everything.
I was wrong.

Wait a minute, I thought. I had just replaced the software and now I had replaced the hardware. Everything was replaced yet the problem still persisted. OK, the only thing I didn't replace was the computer itself.
Fortunately, I had another computer. New mouse, new receiver, new software and a new computer. It had to work now, right? Wrong. The mouse was still sticking! But there was nothing else to replace. What was going on? How was this even possible? I was completely baffled.

I then began to think about what was different between the time my mouse was working perfectly and the time it began malfunctioning. What, if anything, had changed? The only thing I had done was move my iPhone. The wire to its little docking station in which it sits to recharge and sync with my computer was constantly in the way and getting snagged in my lower desk drawer. So I had simply moved it to a more convenient location. It also placed the iPhone directly in between the mouse and its receiver dongle which was at the back of the computer. The iPhone uses Bluetooth as well as cellular to communicate and evidently one of these frequencies was interfering with the communication frequency of the mouse! I unplugged the mouse receiver at the back of the computer and plugged it into a USB port on the front moving it closer and placing it directly underneath the mouse.  Poof, no more sticking pointer! It worked perfectly.

Cordless phones, Wi-Fi signals, Bluetooth devices and anything else that goes wireless are subject to interference. Don't get me wrong. I'm all in favor of anything that eliminates wires. There's nothing worse that a rat's nest of tangled cords underneath a desk. Yet know that wireless brings along with it a whole new set of rules and problems that aren't as intuitively apparent.

So let my frustrating experience be a warning and a lesson to you. Just because it's cordless doesn't mean it still can't get tangled up with some other invisible cord running through your space.

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