Magic Mouse

[pinto79]

I got the Mobi battery pac/charger for mine and it works great. No more batteries for me!

 

[gloriapattismyt]

Thanks for the Mobee tip!

Wow, I'm going to check out the Mobee Magic Mouse charger. Mine eats batteries pretty fast, possibly because I never turn it off. This sounds like just what I need. My MM is a few years old, but works fine except that it is sometimes slow to reconnect after I change batteries. I have to be patient with it.

 

[Dustball]

I have revived every supposedly dead Magic Mouse I have encountered by cleaning the terminals with alcohol on a cotton swab stick. It always works. If the battery connection is weak or intermittent, the green LED indicator can still go on but the mouse will not be recognized by the computer.

Another thing: you can always force the Mac to look for the Mouse by going into System Preferences ==> Mouse ==> Set up Bluetooth Mouse.

Beat me to it!

In the old days a mouse's rubber ball controlled the cursor and cleaning the "dust" ball required a wet alcohol Q-tip cleaning that worked every time. Now comes the future and infra-red - hallelujah - however, the metal contacts for battery powered wireless mice can get lost in our advanced logic modes.

It's probably a good practice to never touch the metal contacts on batteries or objects into which they are being inserted. Just imagine the damage spraying Pam into an NSA server would do?

Example: Anyone who has ever changed out a halogen light bulb with bare fingers knows how quickly that bulb fails. The imperceptible little oil from fingers creates a "sticky" spot for smoke, dust, grease etc.. Persnickety dirt sensitive electronics demand sterile lines of transmission. Cleaning contacts, bleeding out all traces of power and a ride in a cold fridge for a fix is man's superiority over technology, I reckon.

 

[dotdotdot]

Would applying dielectric grease on the contacts help?

 

[Collin Bl]

Some time ago i bought the Apple rechargeables and charger and it has been a cracker ever since. Of course there has been the odd time where it did not connect by itself but a quick trip here ( where disconnect shows as connect ) sorted it.
http://i1211.photobucket.com/albums/cc439/collinbl2/Mmstuff_zps9cf629a1.jpg

 

[Collin Bl]

more work needed for me to post image

 

[wizardchef]

I got sick of messing with it dropping out, batteries discharging, etc., and bought a Logitech MX mouse. I’ve been very happy with it and the Magic Mouse is resting in the top drawer to my desk sans batteries. Poor design.

 

[Sir_Viver]

Possible Reason: Static Discharge

As we search for "coincidental reasons" WHY a Magic Mouse would FAIL during the replacement of its batteries, we perhaps should include a STATIC DISCHARGE. This would explain its sudden failure. Maybe.

 

[gracerider]

May have battery problem

Given your mac is 2008 you may have an old mouse too. There was a slight problem with old mice in that they didn't hold the batteries in good contact. This can be worked around by adding a small piece of paper between the batteries and and battery cover. Apple replaced mine but that was years ago.

 

[Mike Sprawson]

Given your mac is 2008 you may have an old mouse too. There was a slight problem with old mice in that they didn't hold the batteries in good contact. This can be worked around by adding a small piece of paper between the batteries and and battery cover. Apple replaced mine but that was years ago.

You've probably got something there, as my 4 year old magic mouse WILL NOT work IF I have the back cover on. It went on the blink about a year ago. I messed around with it until I finally figured out what was going on. So now the back cover stays OFF, and all is fine.

 

[Dustball]

Interesting discussion. About a month ago I bought a "like new" magic mouse from a guy on eBay. Maybe a week or so later I started to get erratic window behaviors that wouldn't scroll and when they did they ran wild. Did some tweeking with disk utility and TechTool Pro and things seemed to settle down, A couple weeks ago I decided to configure the mouse for other tasks and my computer went out of my control opening windows and typing a single keystroke dozens of times. Lost complete control of the magic mouse utility and finally managed to boot from a disc and run disk utility, which, itself, was behaving oddly.

To make a long story short the mouse, even though I restored it to the old configuration, still ran wild and disc utility gave me red notifications to repair the hard drive. I retired the mouse and reinstalled my old wireless mouse and all is well. It would appear the magic mouse is the source of unmanageable problems.

Now, I hope eBay and PayPal will fulfill their guarantees.

 

[Pasquanel]

I've been using a MM for about 3 years now and at one point it started acting erratically and slow to connect. I'm not sure where I read this (I thought it was here) but a poster suggested i cut a piece of a business card and place it between the batteries and the back cover, I did and its been fine ever since for well over a year now.

 

[Dustball]

It was a surprise to me, but the magic mouse wasn't my problem - it was the keyboard. If you have another keyboard you might try it.

If it is the mouse: Clean the battery's contacts. Dampen Q-tips with alcohol and scrub them. It's possible dirt could affect the contacts from smoking, or air born oils. Remote, but lasers in a computer itself can be affected by years of use in dusty environments, so dirt can't be ruled out.