Hello and welcome to another free computer repair lesson brought to you by beyourownit.com. Lesson 13. It’s more of a general meat and potatoes type of lesson, but one that we feel that I want you to go through. That’s a little bit of a lesson on mice, or computer mice something you use everyday.

In general, it’s going to be a pretty short lesson. There’s a lot of different types, different interfaces, different features that they can have, but it really boils down to two things: comfort and usability.

To cover kind of the different types of mice out there, you got a wide variety of ports, if you can look back at the older styles, you could’ve seen some nine pen type ports, PS2 was the next one for many, many years. Now, they’re generally USB.

Repairing computers used to be a huge pain in the butt because we just had three, four, or five different mice just laying around, just to make sure that we could actually work on the computer.
Otherwise, the different types generally can vary from a standard, very flat, very serial type mice, which you’ll see right in schools and things like that.

The other type of mice you’ll see here is a trackball. This is what we use. We love it. For anyone who uses his or her computer for anything but gaming, if you use it just for day to day and for general use, we suggest for a trackball, instead of moving the mouse all around.

You get this nice little ball on the side that you move around with your thumb, and then you use the mouse as normal. It’s extremely comfortable and very good on the wrist. We love them.

The other types are the wireless and wired. This is kind of a picture of a pretty standard looking mouse. They give you a quick word of advice. With wireless mice, we really like them, but if you’re going to get one, we highly recommend you get something a little bit nicer, like a Logitech that has a charging pad or a charging dock that you can put it on to charge when you’re not using it.

Because there’s nothing worse than having a wireless device running out of batteries, and you don’t have any laying around even though they typically take double A or triple A, or something pretty common.

The other thing is, if you have a newer mouse, more than an optical reader than a trackball underneath, or a rollerball, you don’t necessarily need a mousepad. But we recommend using one anyway because you can damage your desk, your computer surface, and it’s generally more comfortable on your hand.

That’s something you should think about. And also they make those nice mousepads with wrist support. So if you’re the type of person who has your hand on a mouse all day long, look for one of those nice gel pads that can help support your wrist.

Once we got those for all of our employees, people’s wrists were a lot in better shape at the end of the day. It costs probably $3 or $4 for us to buy them.

So for computer mice, there are certain things that I’ll tell you about: DPI, and accuracy and sensitivity. Well, those things are important. It’s supposed to maybe fuse the 80 20 rule, about 20% of the population.
We need to worry about something that you’re comfortable with. It needs to be something that get’s your job done; something that’s reliable, and typically something in the Logitech brand. Microsoft mice are also very, very good.

So that completes this lesson, and if you’re not part of our computer repair training program already, make sure you come on over to beyourownit.com, sign up today.