Mouse and PowerMate Try to Kill P4

posted on february 5, 2003, tag: tech

Last night I turned my P4 desktop on for the first time in the new apartment, because I wanted to grab some stuff I had been working on before the move and burn it to a CDRW. My plan was to put that CDRW into my iBook and work on that, since I've only got the dial-up working there (no modem in the PC).

The machine started fine, and after I logged into WindowsXP, I moved my mouse (Logitech MouseMan® Dual Optical), nothing happened. I knew what was wrong instantly, because it happened the first time I installed my PowerMate. The PowerMate has this nasty habit (I've heard only on PCs) of acting like it's your mouse when installed, before you install the PM software. I knew why it happened, too—I had plugged the PM into a different slot on my USB hub than it had been in before the move. My mistake. I unplugged the PM, unplugged and plugged the mouse back in. I saw an hourglass for a split second, and then the mouse lit up underneath. Good. I moved it. Fine. I moved it again.

And then the screen turned that familiar blue (not nearly as familiar in XP) for a split second, then the computer shut off. What the fuck, I thought. It restarted automatically. XP said it needed to check the disks—Fine, whatever—and then loaded properly. I logged in, moved the mouse, and it did the same thing. Fuck.

On the next startup, the disk-check found a bunch of corrupted system files (which it fixed) and then I was back to logging in again. I logged in, moved the mouse, it shut down. This happened again and again and again. I started to get nervous, because the list of corrupted system files got longer upon each startup. Finally, I unplugged the mouse and started once more. Logged in, waited... everything was fine. Messed around a bit via the keyboard, opened applications, and decided it must have been a glitch. Plugged the mouse back in, moved it, and it shut down again. At this point I'm getting mad. I can't figure out what is wrong. It was late, so I went to sleep.

Tonight when I got home I unplugged the mouse, booted into safe mode, uninstalled every USB item, the Logitech MouseWare software and the PowerMate software. I rebooted into normal mode and plugged the mouse in. It started asking me for DLL and SYS files, which I found strewn in tons of different folders on my system. Finally, after 10 minutes of searching and using only my keyboard, I had the mouse working again. I restarted and moved it and everything was fine.

Thank god I know my way around DOS, safe mode and Windows. I have a feeling if I were just some regular schmuck, I would have been to the point of taking my computer somewhere for repair (at which point, most likely, I would have received an answer like, "It needs to be reformatted"). I feel bad for people out there who don't know how to deal with these kinds of problems.

On a side note: I have never had a problem like this with my iBook. I'm not saying Macs are better, or so simple that it's not possible, I'm just saying that sometimes I feel OS X was built with a little more care than WindowsXP. I could be wrong. Anyway, I just thought I would share this useless story for anyone out there who can relate (I'm sure there are plenty).

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