Afternoon all.

My sister has broken the computer back home. That’s “broken” from the point of view of her & my mother, mind, since what she’s actually done is bugger up the mouse and the PS/2 port, not the actual machine. From where they are, though, in the land of not-knowing-the-keyboard-shortcuts, it’s effectively screwed.

I only found this out because my mother had to ring me to find out how to shut it down without damaging it, which, in some ways, puts her a level up from the average users who’d just pull the plug out – she was, once, quite good with computers, before the advent of “start” buttons which, er, don’t, in fact, start anything, and her main worry was that, without a mouse to click the shutdown button, it wouldn’t be able to park the hard disk properly, and it’d all get bust. (To be fair, she didn’t say that, but I extrapolated from the fact the computer we used to have did demand the feels-like-we’-re-computing rigmarole of returning to the c:> prompt and asking it if it’d like to get parked. It used to bring back a message that said something like “HD PARK OK. NOW TURN POWER OFF!” …)

Anyway, that call took some time, because I first had to explain the “ctrl+alt+delete, and now navigate to “shutdown” with the cursor keys” bit, and then ask why the mouse wasn’t plugged in. It wasn’t, it seems, because my sister decided it was broke last night, and tried to swap it for another mouse which “had a connector like a spaceship” in that it was “wedge-shaped, and full of little holes.” I didn’t even know we still had a mouse to plug into the com port back home, but apparently we do. Predictably, that didn’t work (Hell, even I don’t know where the serial port is on that computer, and I built the damn thing) and so (I’m guessing) she got really cross and – somehow – ripped the PS/2 mouse either in or out, so what they now have at home is a PC with a PS/2 mouse port full of the pins from the connector on the mouse, and a mouse that can never connect to anything again.

Given that the mouse plugs in at the back of the machine, down and to the left of the desk, I’m assuming she took up the mouse in two hands and ripped up and towards her. Can’t imagine why, mind. Ordinarily I’d say I’ll go home and fix it, but it’s nae really that simple, for I’m not due home until October as it is.

I’d not advise buying a whole new PS/2 mouse in the hopes that the port will be OK if you cut the power and pull the shredded pins out with tweezers, because it doesn’t sound like the balance of probability is in favour of it being in a good way, given what’s happened to it, and the box back there only has two USB ports, one of which is taken up with giving them an internet connection. Two, ordinarily, would be plenty for them, as it’s one for the Internet thing and one for the printer / USB stick, neither of which get used at the same time on enough of a regular basis to ever matter.

If, however, they’re going to have to give one over to the mouse, that suggests lots of disconnecting the Internet fun-ness whenever they want to save to a USB key, or print something, or similar.

But, even I – prone as I have always been to sudden flashes of mentalist rage in the vicinity of computers (once, after I got my top character killed in Hillsfar, because of a stupid fight in the arena because of Wak bloody Rather, after I’d spent weeks getting up at 06:00 before heading off to junior school to play it, I caught hold of the monitor, dragged it towards me and then rammed it back so it made an inch-deep dent in the wall behind it – damn thing survived, amazingly, we’ve still got it somewhere) – even I find it hard to imagine destroying a mouse just by pulling. Or, at least, destroying a mouse so the pins stay in the port; dragging it free and lobbing it against the wall I can see could happen more easily, and picking it up and slamming it into the desk so hard the button spring break I’ve done once or twice. But ripping the pins out and leaving ’em in the socket? Man, that is excessive violence against peripherals.

Also, as I say, it rather sinks the use of the PC, which always strikes me as a bit dim… Ah well. It does, at least, save me telling you about the daft dream from this morning (there was a bus, in Bath, which ended up by Morrisons in Aber, and a guy stood in the road with a crash trolley, and revived a guy in the bus next to the one I was in, who’d been having a heart attack). That dream was rubbish.

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Comments

  1. On February 22, 2007 Statto says:

    Anyway, that call took some time, because I first had to explain the “ctrl+alt+delete, and now navigate to “shutdown” with the cursor keys” bit.

    You could’ve just told her to push the power button!

    As for the USB port disaster, they could always buy a hub. Or, since the keyboard’s PS/2 as well (right?), they can test the mouse port once its been attacked with tweezers to remove any stray pins with before laying out for a possibly-worthless PS/2 mouse?

  2. On February 22, 2007 Scaman Dan says:

    You could’ve just told her to push the power button!

    Or, if you really wanted to do it from the keyboard, pressed CTRL-ESCAPE, then pressed “u” (or used the cursor keys to navigate the Start menu).

    As for the USB port disaster, they could always buy a hub.

    First thing I thought.

  3. On February 22, 2007 Scaman Dan says:

    You could’ve just told her to push the power button!

    Or, if you really wanted to do it from the keyboard, pressed CTRL-ESCAPE, then pressed “u” (or used the cursor keys to navigate the Start menu).

    As for the USB port disaster, they could always buy a hub.

    First thing I thought.

  4. On February 22, 2007 Statto says:

    Ctrl-esc = Start?!?

    Good geekery. Enjoyed that.

  5. On February 22, 2007 Mister JTA says:

    I suggested the power button as well, obviously. But I figured ctrl+alt_del was likely to be a more useful thing to know in the long term, and one worth talking through.