Mouse Not Working

The mouse, or should we call the hands of your computer! Without this little equipment your computer is rendered helpless to be worked upon, well, unless of course, you are very savvy with keyboard shortcuts. However, you would agree that using the keyboard as a substitute for the 'easy-to-use' mouse gets tedious and not something which you would like to do every time. Moreover not everything that needs to be executed using the mouse, can be done using the keyboard. So, this leaves us with one basic inference that the mouse is one of the most vital peripherals of a computer.

Malfunctioning Mouse

Here are some common factors which can cause a mouse to stop working.

The most common problem is a loose connection or connection to the wrong port of the CPU. If it is so, then detach the cord of the mouse and plug it in. If you are using a PS/2 style mouse, then you might require to restart your computer after unplugging and plugging the mouse cord. If it is a USB mouse, then you need not do the same. If the wire of the mouse is twisted, bent or damaged in any way, then even in this case it might not function.

Another method of diagnosing the problem behind your mouse's malfunction is to try using a different mouse in the PC. Similarly, try your mouse in a different PC and see if it works. Most of the time, people accidentally connect the cord of the mouse to the port of the keyboard. But in this case, it is easy to identify the error as even the keyboard will not function.

A mouse may stop working because of some problems with the serial port, when you are using a serial mouse. The problem may also arise after you get your computer system upgraded. One reason behind this may be the old cable that attached from the serial port connectors to the motherboard headers are left in place. These cables are not universal and so this implies that you might have the wrong kind installed on the motherboard.

A PS/2 style mouse uses what is known as IRQ12. In some cases, it has been found that this creates a resource conflict (when two different devices are both trying to use a system resource like an interrupt request line, DMA channel or I/O address) with another device. Using a PS/2 style mouse on a serial port also makes the mouse useless.