Thursday, November 4, 2010

Correcting Logitech G9x gaming mouse jitters

OK so here's the first post of a blog to document to easy fixes for common problems that I encounter that usually take half an hour or forty five minutes of googling and regooogling to avoid url squatters, keyword trolls, trick pay sites and those inane generated sites that use some weird auto syntax aggregate. Also this will hopefully help illustrate some really obvious things that I guess everyone but me knows since when you search for them using common words you find posts from 2007 explaining why windows XP isn't worth the switch.

  Logitech makes a gaming mouse called the G9x and I guess the "G" is for Gamer because damn is it G-treme. All marketing hullabaloo aside, I'm not a counterstrike nerd arguing which 1996 version release is superior (becuase it's obviously 1.28.3,) but I a big picky baby with small hands who uses a death claw grip when clicking youtube links so I need a mouse to suit my intertelephonernetting (surfing while watching tv and grunting occasionally into the phone) needs.Which this is, it's great, small, repsonsive, buttons are all 'clicky' in a good way and you can make it light up Mauve. Which is also a fremen killing word so don't say it on video chat (this is why there are so many dropped calls in New York and SF.)

    HOWEVER if you lift this sucker up your cursor does a little jig. Now, this isn't a twitch; more like some goddamn ouija board mumbo jumbo, dancing its way over to the close firefox button like it knows what site you're on and it is very disappointed in you. It's called liftoff distance, the amount you have bring it up before it stops reading and on most mice it's measured in CD width, so like .8 mm or summat. Normal on a cheap unit is like 3 CD, so just under 2mm. This sucker reads at around  15 CD or 1.2cm and if I know my latin that's hundreds of m's. The upshot is your trying to shoot that dweeb Billy Gruber from Miss Sparrows third period, you run out of pad real estate and suddenly your wiggling like the dickens, shaking all over.  Damn and this thing cost like 120$. Are there even more expensive mice availableÉ (thatès suppposed to be a question mark but thereès something rotten in Denmark)

Anyway since I know yèall just scroll to the pictures hereès the fix:







Yeah, thats masking tape. 

So I guess this works with scotch tape too even though itès really cheap and never picks up the tab (thatès a Scottish joke) Must be something to do with a redundant resolution check on the reflected laser, but I think itès a pretty neat illustration of of the value of hubris.

Next blog postès gonna be on why there is even a way to enabling french canadian keyboard in windows 7 and also how to fix it so your blog doesnèt gain an accent two thirds through.