Does anyone else really miss cleaning the gunk out of old mice?

HardwareGaming MiceDoes anyone else really miss cleaning the gunk out of old mice?When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

(Image credit: intodune/Getty Images)

A cross-section of an old computer mouse.

The balls were weird: They had the color of an overboiled egg yolk, and were dense, but felt uncannily soft like skin. I always wanted to cut one open, but never did.Turns outat least some of them were steel spheres wrapped in rubber, which explains why they felt like nothing else on earth, and also gave them the ideal heft and texture for rolling up dust and converting it into nasty gunk that was deposited on the rollers, eventually clogging the whole system.

How I miss those weird little balls and those constantly gunked-up rollers, and the degunking ritual that came with them—a great PC gaming tradition lost to technological progress.

It’s much harder to blame my aim on the pristine 20,000 DPI sensor in my mouse today. You can’t open it, and it would be pointless to. The most you can do is wipe it off, but I’ve never needed to.

(Image credit: Roberto/Getty Images)

A cross-section of a computer mouse.

Maybe what I’m pining for doesn’t have to do with mice specifically. I also like freeing vacuum cleaner rollers from the bonds of accumulated hair strands, and removing all the keys from my keyboard to swab its crevasses with rubbing alcohol. Maybe it’s just human nature to enjoy degunking moving parts, the effect of some mechanical engineering gene that rewards getting gears spinning and actuators actuating.

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The more the objects around me become un-openable and arcane—how do you degunk a spotty Bluetooth connection?—the more I seem to admire simple, mechanical things. Maybe that’s why I spent so much time thinking about what kind of fans I wanted in my PC (I went with aNoctua CPU coolerwhose look I’d describe as “Windows 95 hot rod”) and came to care so much about mechanical keyboard switches.

I just miss moving parts, and the gross but intuitively solvable problems they come with.

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The HyperX Saga and Saga Pro are magnetic build-a-mouse kits with interchangeable components and the option to add 3D printed parts

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