Now that was freaky !

[Ebere]

I have two hard drives, with 5 distros on the two.

1 Kubuntu, 2 Ubuntus, and 2 Mints.

I've had some problems with just about all of them. But had the most luck with Mint.

I was browsing here a while ago, and decided that I had put off cleaning up my bookmarks, for long enough.

That last click, when I watched all the old bookmarks disappear... The computer locked up.

When it came back, the mouse didn't work.

Only, it was just the left button.

Took me a while to figure out that it was a problem with the mouse itself.

In the meantime, I was in panic mode, because no matter what I did, no matter what distro I booted into... Even using a livecd... it was all the same.

I thought something major had gone wrong with the os, and had affected all the installations. And even somehow was affecting a livecd boot...

What a time for a hardware problem with the mouse.

Oh well, good news is that the mint os is STILL working very well.

I plugged in a wireless mouse. And even without a restart, the mouse worked right off the bat.

[beefstu]

I hate it when things like that happen, you never think of the most obvious reason either!

That's the good thing with Linux, just plug a new mouse/keyboard in and works straight away, no "Windows is searching for drivers". In windows, if I plug my wireless mouse usb dongle into a different port to the one it was originally in, it trie to install the drivers again!. I even plugged an old ps/2 keyboard into my Linux PC the other day and it worked instantly, I though that you had to restart for it to get recognised but I guess that's just a Windows thing too. Anyway I digress...

[MrD]

Had a family computer go all weird recently. It was using Windows and the HDD would install the OS, then less than a week or so later it would go all "gluey" and I finally managed to figure out after a long googling session that the operation mode had changed to the lower speed one (I forget the names of them now) By uninstalling the HDD in the Hardware Manager it would reinstall on next boot and be back to normal for a few days or a week. The machine had been running slow on them for about a year and they hadn't said anything, even I would come round and think it was slow, but it was a P4 2.6ghz cpu and 1gig ram running Windows and I just thought it's hardware class was the fault.

Unfortunately I thought the HDD was at fault and had a new one ordered in the post. In the meantime I had stuck their HDD in my machine and it was running fine, the new HDD was coming to my address and when it arrived I couldn't get to the family pc for almost a week. In the meantime they had a low end laptop they were using to get online. Their original HDD was still running fine in my machine!

In a lightbulb moment I went through my spares boxes and grabbed a few extra IDE ribbons and found an unused custom one that I took with me to place both the old and replacement HDD's in their machine, replacing their ribbon which seemed to have turned hard and crispy feeling. It ran, and it ran, until I realised this ribbon with a value of £0.99 in their machine was the single component that had crippled them for so long!

How many users would think of a simple IDE ribbon? If I hadn't been around they were ready to buy an entire new machine! They couldn't replace a HDD and reinstall Windows. Think of all the computers that have been dumped in landfills because something as silly as an IDE ribbon has failed! Worse still, think of all the machines in landfills because a mouse went wrong!

[Ebere]

Exactly so !