Help troubleshooting a mouse / repairing a mouse scroll wheel? [Unsolved, workaround found] (lemmy.world)

submitted 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I have two wireless mice. One is a really good mouse that served me for years until it got too beat up, and now the scroll wheel doesn't work very well. The other is a newer HP mouse (specifically HP 280 Silent Wireless Mouse, product number 19u64AA) that is a bloody piece of shit and I hate it.

The HP mouse currently has two main issues with it. 1, it doesn't "sleep" or turn itself off after a period of inactivity. It just stays on, even if the usb dongle is disconnected, until the battery just dies on it. 2, it's clicking software/firmware had a fucking stroke or some shit. It only clicks on the active screen; so for example, if I have Firefox open and fullscreen, it will not click on the task bar on the bottom of my screen at all. It won't even register that it's hovering over something down there, it just refuses. That, and the middle click won't work. It's genuinely annoying, because the mouse used to work with no issues. I have no idea what caused this, and my conspiracy theory is that HP just kills mice that are alive for too long, because this is fucking horse shit. I do not recommend this fucking mouse at all for this.

What's funny is, I tried both my previous mouse (the one with the broken scroll wheel), and my desktop's wired mouse, and both worked excellently. No issues at all, unable to replicate the issues experienced by my HP mouse. Crawling through the journalctl logs don't show anything wrong with any of the mice, at least not that my noob ass could tell, and the HP support page for the 280 doesn't have a fucking user manual for it. There just doesn't seem to be one at all, not one I can find at least.

Anyways, /rant. How can I see what's wrong with the 280, or fix what might be wrong with it (or factory reset the mouse, if that's a thing)? Alternatively, how can I fix my other mouse's scroll wheel (Victsing Wireless Mouse model PC106A my beloved)?

Edit: Forgot to mention, on Linux mint 22.1 cinnamon, on an HP laptop oddly enough (you would think HP accessories would work with HP products). if you need any information, journalctl, inxi, my fucking social security number, whatever, lmk.

Edit edit (workaround found): So I reset my laptop, with the mouse still plugged in. Upon reboot, the functionality was still broken, and so was the touch pad. So I took a look at xinput list to see what was going on; my thought process was, maybe there's some interference between the mouse and touch pad. I went through, disabling things one by one to see what it did; a number of the things listed didn't seem to affect anything, but i found my mouse was 8 and my touchpad was 13. When I re-enabled my touch pad, suddenly everything was working as expected. I don't know why. I tried restarting my pc again; same issue, but this time i tried disabling and reenabling my mouse, and then suddenly functionality was restored. In both cases, the order in which xinput displayed things was changed, but they were changed differently both times; I don't know if there's a load order that's reflected in xinput or if it just reads things off as it finds them. Either way, for whatever reason, functionality with the mouse and touchpad have some interference when the mouse is first introduced. Though, the touchpad settings in the system settings doesn't seem to have any effect when the 280 mouse is plugged in; its set to be disabled if there's a mouse, which doesn't happen. I don't know what's causing these issues; disabling and enabling through the terminal seems to be the only workaround. There are other devices on my xinput list, I couldn't tell what each of them did, but disabling/reenabling them doesn't seem to have any effect.

Here's the output of my xinput list if anyone is curious about what I have going on:

$ xinput list
⎡ Virtual core pointer                    	id=2	[master pointer  (3)]
⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer              	id=4	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ GTCH7503:00 2A94:D009                   	id=11	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ SYNA32D8:00 06CB:CEE7 Touchpad          	id=13	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ SYNA32D8:00 06CB:CEE7 Mouse             	id=12	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ HP 285M HP 280/285 Wireless Mouse Consumer Control	id=9	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ HP 285M HP 280/285 Wireless Mouse       	id=8	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard                   	id=3	[master keyboard (2)]
    ↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard             	id=5	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Video Bus                               	id=6	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Power Button                            	id=7	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard            	id=14	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Wireless hotkeys                        	id=15	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ HP WMI hotkeys                          	id=16	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ HP 285M HP 280/285 Wireless Mouse Consumer Control	id=10	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ HP 285M HP 280/285 Wireless Mouse System Control	id=17	[slave  keyboard (3)]```

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[-] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago

my conspiracy theory is that HP just kills mice that are alive for too long

HP is that kind of company.

My right-out-of-warranty Logitech M590 mouse lost its pairing to its USB-receiver upon booting up Windows after using the mouse in Linux for weeks out-of-warranty. I bought another one, and that too did the same the first time I booted up Windows after the warranty had expired.

Finally I searched the issue, and it's normal. I had to install a non-default Logitech software in Windows and re-pair the apparently broken mice to their receivers. Both mice work again, except the older one's left button is acting up a bit.

A non-asshole company would have notified me "Your mouse receiver needs an update that requires re-pairing the connection manually. Do you want to continue the update?". And why the hell would a mouse receiver need an update when the warranty ends?

Obviously the purpose is to make the mouse appear broken with plausible deniability and bluff the customer into buying a new mouse.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

probably a mostly hardware issue

The scroll wheel is an optical device. There are holes in the wheel just under the surface. The holes are very thin slots oriented almost like spokes. Then there are two pairs of infrared diodes and photo receivers. These are precision offset so that only one IR diode is shining through the slot at any given time. With this setup the direction of rotation can be determined based upon which slot goes high to low relative to the other. It can be difficult to wrap your head around how this works at first, but most rotary encoders, like sound knobs that can spin infinitely, work on this principal. If stuff like lint and dust blocks these slots or the light from the diodes gets around the wheel somehow it creates problems. The microcontroller needs sharp digital edges for this to work well.

Other than dirt and grime, mechanical buttons fail. Corrosion is common from skin moisture and stuff.

The actual chips used are extremely integrated for the camera used for the mouse movement, buttons, and scroll wheel.

In all consumer garbage, the cheap electrolytic capacitors are suspect. If one of these fail, it will cause intermittent problems. These capacitors are like mini reserves or energy buckets. When there is a big sharp current draw that causes the voltage to dip, the caps are there to smooth out that dip and provide a small reserve capacity near the likely source. Electrolytic caps have a fluid inside that, when dried out makes them stop working and act more like a resistor in most cases. When a cap has high equivalent series resistance, the respective voltage rail may go low and cause very unpredictable behaviors. Only some parts of the circuit may start to fail at these brownout voltages and then immediately resume or any number of other behaviors.

Likewise, a lithium battery may start to have issues with providing enough current and fail in a similar way causing brownout issues.

The big current draw in this instance will be the radio. All radio transmitters, even in little wireless devices like a mouse, use a ton of power in extremely short bursts. This is hard on circuit components. The efficiency is due to sending very short pulses less often, but the power required is always high.

It is likely that, if it has a lithium battery, this has gone bad from charge cycling. Charging a lithium battery requires at least two of three charging phases. If a cell is dead, a very slow trickle charge is required. The two standard phases are a constant voltage and then a constant current phase to safely charge lithium batteries. These phases require some simple feedback. If the cell is charged in the constant voltage phase, but it fails to reach the required voltage for the constant current phase, this may prevent a simple charge controller from completing the charge cycle. Most consumer junk with a lithium battery is going to have a very simple batman charge controller setup. It is likely/that the batman is not connected to any logic or digital feedback mechanism that evil HP controls. They are principally cheap bastards so overly optimizing profit over functionality is likely, like Boeing flying the doors off level corporate suite stupidity.

Along those lines, if not lithium, circuit noise would also be suspect, likely from degradation from grime and corrosion. There are often two PCBs in a mouse with some kind of connector between them. This often will be your failure point from moisture as the galvanic potential is high between the different metals in contact and mechanical stresses.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago

Could you explain the batman part I tried a search engine but was not illuminated

[-] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago

Slang for battery manager/-ment

[-] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago

aha! thanks :) I liked your comment a lot thank you.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

Thank you for the in depth write up. I want you to know I read it over multiple times and really do appreciate it.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

update: definitely software related. unsure of cause. see edits in op.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

You're getting past my experience and into stuff I am half aware of on the periphery. I think you likely have an issue in the boot loader stuff. Like the bootloader initiates all the hardware onto handles that Linux then takes control over. IIRC Linux doesn't implicitly trust any of this, but instead goes through it discovering what exists and where. Most touch pads on laptops are just an internal USB device, but not all. Some are actual hardware implementations. I had an old work Apple laptop that had a 40-odd-pin ribbon cable connection once – crazy.

It may be a situation where the touch pad is some oddball unique implementation or some hacked workaround specific to your machine. Check for scans of the same on linux-hardware.org and be sure to do a scan of yours too for anyone else. See if anyone has left notes or used other specific kernels. If some odd-ball thing works, it is probably in their scan. Do a GitHub search for the model. Sometimes that turns up something useful. Arch documentation is another. Gentoo has the documentation for all the low level stuff, how it works, and how to implement it in advanced tutorial form. Base Debian is the hardware hackers space. At this level of kernel configuration stuff, all distros are basically the same.

I have a less intrusive but similar issue with a RGB keyboard controller on a laptop that is outside of the kernel in unregistered memory.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago

Just spotting a quick check you could try, at least as far as the scroll wheel..

Try blowing the mouse out with compressed air, especially around the wheel, buttons, and laser lens.

Most if not all scroll wheels use a slotted disk and optical sensors to detect the position and movement of the wheel, so if dust and/or dead skin particles get in the wrong spots, it can totally confuse the mouse.

Beyond that, if the click on the mouse wheel doesn't work, it could be damaged either way, open circuit or short circuit. If it failed short circuit, the mouse will think you're constantly holding the wheel button down, which would keep steady delivering a signal, running the battery down and confusing the operating system at the same time.

Good luck 🤞

[-] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

update: definitely software related. unsure of cause. see edits in op.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

re: spot check. I'm assuming this is for the hp mouse, right? I haven't tried that yet, I'll give it a shot with my roommate's compressed air when he gets home. Thanks, I'll report back when accomplished.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

Also, hopefully you or someone else hasn't spilled any liquid on/in it. But if that's a possibility, if you're able to and comfortable with opening the mouse up, if you spot any crud on the board or around the buttons, you can try cleaning that off with rubbing alcohol and Q-Tips..

[-] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

update: my roomate gave me permission to enter his quarters and acquire the compressed air for usage. blew out both mice, both still had the same issues. for the victsing i think it might be a physical damage issue; the switch or whatever controlling the scroll wheel is broken. for the hp, it's a piece of shit and likely a software issue i think.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

I just got home and tried a thing on your behalf, using a perfectly good wired mouse of mine.

I simulated my suspicion that the mouse wheel click button might be shorted out, by holding the wheel button down while trying to left click on the taskbar.

Sure enough, in that condition, it doesn't recognize the left click on the taskbar.

I am pretty sure your wheel click button is shorted out and the system thinks you're constantly holding it down.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago

My current mouse's wheel stopped working and I took it apart, cleaned it out good (alcohol and q-tips are great), and reassembled it. Worked great... for a while. And then broke again.

If I were you, I'd try cleaning the "beloved" and see if that does it. It might work "forever" if you do.

The HP's issues are weird. They mostly seem software-related, not hardware. (Clicking on a window but not the taskbar? And you're sure the other mouse works in those cases with no other variables different than which mouse you use?) Does the HP mouse require special drivers or something?

Whatever the case, fixing the HP feels like a lot more work and googling than fixing the Victsing to me.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

re: cleaning out victsing mouse wheel. It's been in my school bag for a while, and probably is actually broken since scrolling on it only works in one direction. think it might be the switch inside, not sure though. I'll give this a shot, thank you.

re: hp's issues. yeah, definitely a software thing. It's fucking irritating, and im very certain there were no other variables besides the mouse used. I kept everything the same, then tried all three of of the mouses in sequential order with nothing different between unplugging and plugging the next one in, and they all worked excellently except the hp. I don't know about special drivers for it, I've just been trusting my distro to handle all that (linux mint superiority). And yes, it definitely seems a lot more work than fixing the victsing; my concern is that the physical hardware on the victsing mouse is actually just broken, in which case ordering a replacement and manually fixing it is something beyond my current scope of skills, esp if it requires any soldering whatsoever.

thanks for the advice though!

[-] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

update: definitely software related. unsure of cause. see edits in op.

this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025

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