Mouse not found; please click 'OK' to continue

[pne]

This morning, after waking up from suspend-to-RAM, my computer didn't recognise its mouse. I even get the "da-dum" sound of a USB device being disconnected, which I found suspicious (I initially thought that it might have been my printer, which could have been on when I sent the PC to sleep, but was probably my mouse).

Annoying. Especially since this was a chronic problem on Stella's PC and not one I wanted mine to develop. And also because the last time this had happened to me, I had also had the Sims open, and I couldn't figure out how to shut it down cleanly without a mouse. I mean, I can get to the "Exit" button all right, but then it asks me to confirm whether I really want to quit, and I can't dismiss that dialog with the keyboard! Neither Enter, Tab, nor the arrow keys seem to work.

So I crawled behind my PC and put my mouse in a different USB slot. Da-dum, my mouse's LED is shining again. Unplug it and put it back in the original slot, mouse LED is off. WTF? Ah well, plug it into the "new" slot since at least it works there.

(And no annoying "Ooh! New device! Wanna give me an install CD with drivers?", either, thank goodness.)

Comments

[nik-w.livejournal.com]

Gotta love the randomness of PC hardware. We've got a very peculiar computer at work that serves only one purpose - as an interface to the swipe card database for getting through doors and such. The monitor has not worked for weeks, yet I came to phone up to order a new one yesterday and decide to try it one last time and it suddenly decides to work! Even then, though, the software that it runs is the most tempramental thing I've ever come across. About 80% of the time you come to run it, as soon as you try to add a swipe card to the system, the software crashes. No amount of restarting of the program works - you just have to restart the PC and hope it's in a better mood when it reboots! I wonder if it's actually faulty memory being as it's such an intermittent problem, and running XP on 256MB is not fun, but there's nothing can be done about it!:S

[bluewingedcat.livejournal.com]

Try alt + f4 next time you need to quit something and your mouse isn't working. That's generally pretty instant.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Depending on the application, though, it might prompt you to save changes before exiting, or similar (think of closing Word while you have a document open, or whatever) - and I think the Sims 2 dialog box is something like that.