Why does my mighty mouse hate my mac?

September 23, 2005 8:59 AM

How do I bring my mac back from a mighty-mouse induced death?

If I click and drag something across my desktop, I often have to pick my mouse up and move it along the way. This usually means squeezing the side buttons of the mighty mouse, which seems to sort of activate expose. Unfortuantely, activating expose while dragging a file seems to capture most mouse and keyboard input and send them off to the bitbucket. Restarting the finder doesn't help. Is there any way I can recover from this without rebooting my mac?

posted by b1tr0t to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Drag and drop should work within Exposé (ie you can drag things on to Exposéd windows). If you can't, there's something much more serious wrong with your Mac.
posted by cillit bang at 10:27 AM on September 23, 2005

I don't have an answer for your partic problem but I turned off those side buttons pronto as I kept clicking the damn things unintentionally. They seem pretty useless to me and it's easy enough to press F11 to get Expose. If you want to turn off the side buttons, just go into your mouse preferences (assuming you installed the Might Mouse software).
posted by dobbs at 10:35 AM on September 23, 2005

Unfortuantely, activating expose while dragging a file seems to capture most mouse and keyboard input and send them off to the bitbucket. Restarting the finder doesn't help

I have no idea what this means. Is your computer crashing when you activate Exposé?
If you find that you have to pick up your mouse a lot, you should try turning up your tracking speed in the Mouse system preference pane. You'll move your mouse less, and it'll make your computer seem a lot faster.
posted by designbot at 10:50 AM on September 23, 2005

I suggest you do a hardware reset by holding the power button (for 2-3 secs) and releasing it.
posted by merv at 10:52 AM on September 23, 2005

I suggest you do a hardware reset by holding the power button (for 2-3 secs) and releasing it.

Why would he want to do that? He asked if there was a way to recover without rebooting.

b1trot, can you be more specific about what's happening? As cillit bang said, activating Exposé while dragging shouldn't be a problem. You should just be able to press the side butons again and exit. Is this not working for you? If not, your Mighty Mouse probably isn't the problem.
posted by designbot at 11:13 AM on September 23, 2005

The exact behavior I see is:
1. pick up a file over on the far left of the left monitor.
2. start dragging to the right
3. run out of desk space
4. pick up mouse
5. screen turns grayish, but it isn't really in expose mode
6. keep moving mouse right to the other display
7. drop file into destination (mail.app for example)
8. mac no longer responds to kdb or mouse input except option-apple-esc
9. after killing everything, the only thing left to do is reboot the mac

Next time it happens, I'll ssh in and see if there is anything obvious that needs killing.
posted by b1tr0t at 2:33 PM on September 23, 2005

have you tried unplugging the mighty mouse and plugging in the old mouse?
posted by filmgeek at 4:26 PM on September 23, 2005