Cleaning a Mouse

I've been collecting all the photography-related things I'll need to pack for our Christmas trip to Manhattan.  I'm trying to stay as small and as lightweight as possible while still bringing enough high quality gear to get excellent photos and video.  It has been a bit of a struggle but I think I've narrowed down my photography gear making for perhaps the lightest travel photography bag I've ever had on any trip.  

I usually pack my small Microsoft Surface tablet for storing photos at the end of each day and for some quick blog updates with photos.  My Surface is getting very old and the keyboard is actually falling apart now because of its age and the amount of use it has gotten over the past ten years so I'm packing a newer and, unfortunately, larger laptop that I use exclusively for astronomy.  This laptop has a touchpad but I'm not too fond of touchpads so I planned to bring along my old Microsoft Arc portable mouse from my Surface.

I dug out this little mouse only to find that it is so sticky that it was very difficult to use.  It was sticking to my hand, sticking to whatever surface I was trying to slide it across so it was actually more difficult to use than the annoying touchpad.  I tried cleaning it with some LCD wipes but that seemed to only make it stickier.  

This mouse has a thin coating of rubber on it which, when new, provided a nice textured surface to hold.  Now that textured surface is deteriorating making the mouse sticky, top and bottom.  It is sticky to hold and it sticks to the mousepad.  

My first thought was to just replace this mouse with a new portable mouse.  The problem is that I really like this particular mouse.  It lays very flat when turned off which makes it very easy to tuck into a small luggage pocket.  All other models are two to three times as thick making it more difficult to pack and transport.  To turn it on and use it, you snap it into a curved arc position (hence the name of the mouse) and that automatically turns it on and connects to your laptop's Bluetooth.  Functionally, it is a really nice little mouse so, if I had to replace it, I'd want the same model.  Unfortunately, I paid about $60 for this mouse ten years ago and when I checked the current price of the current model, they range from about $75 to $140 depending on the color you want.  This quickly persuaded me to be a bit more aggressive and even harsh in trying to clean up my old arc mouse.

The LCD wipes didn't work so I opted for trying rubbing alcohol with Q-tips.  This was working but cleaning up just a small spot on the mouse required about a dozen Q-tips, a lot of elbow grease and a lot of time.  Then I tried an adhesive remover.  At this point, I wanted to remove all of that texturized rubber on the top and bottom of the mouse.  If I couldn't clean this mouse well enough, then it was useless to me anyway so I pulled out the more harsh adhesive remover and tried that.  Fortunately, the adhesive remover loosened up the deteriorating rubber making it easier for me to clean up the mouse using the rubbing alcohol and Q-tips.

In all, I think I spent about two hours on this mouse but it is now clean and smooth...  and, it still works!

The downside is that the odor of the adhesive remover really affected my breathing so I had trouble breathing all through the night and got very little sleep.  I'll pump extra medications through today and probably sleep most of the day away but my mouse is clean, smooth and it didn't cost me anything financially.  I'm paying for it with my health though.

A new Microsoft Arc mouse would have been really nice though.  The one I like most (pictured at right, courtesy of Microsoft) is $140 though which is why I chose to spend an entire night cleaning the deteriorated rubber off my old mouse.  I don't think I can justify spending $140 on a small laptop mouse.