Yeah, hated boiling the eggs every week or so.
this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2026
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Came to the comments to check for this.
Exactly why I opened the comments as well.
Those balls were usually steel ball bearings with a synthetic rubber wrapped around it. They gave the entire mouse some weight which made the mouse feel better to use. You could clean them with something like soap, but you'd have to be careful not to use anything that messed up the rubber. Some people cleaned them wrong, which caused the rubber to become more sticky and thus get dirty sooner. You'd also risk the rubber becoming harder and not sticky enough, so they would slip a lot. They were basically a pain in the ass and I'm happy we've moved on from that.
Got it: be careful when rubbing the balls otherwise they’ll get too sticky or hard
...
For me the extra resistance the mass gave against acceleration made it really good for playing first-person shooters.
Some gaming mice these days come with small weights you can put in the bottom to adjust the heft
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I loved breaking the little dust rolls wrapped around the direction shafts
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My first job was IT Assistant at a manufacturing company. I spent at least 50% of my time cleaning mice.
I used to get to go inside to turn on check and setup the computer lab before school in jr high. Mostly spent cleaning rollers or looking for occasional missing mouse balls.
Got to play too if there was spare time, and it sure beat standing in a prison like asphalt court yard for 30 minutes in the winter dark.
I do. When modern mouses stop working, I feel useless.
These worked on glass. Almost nothing today works on a glass table but these did
I use a thumb-trackball (and have since the 90s). They work on glass. Hell, they work on my lap or beside me if I'm in bed. And no space needed to move around.
Every week or two I pop the ball out and give it a quick wipe with a lenscloth.
Preach the good word, partner
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This comment made me curious so I tested the two mice I use regularly.
My Logitech G502 tracks very poorly on glass and is basically unusable.
My MX Anywhere 2S lives up to its name and seems to track perfectly fine.
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Never washed the ball. I did clean out the runners inside though. They hid away dead skin grime and pet fur better than any keyboard ever will.
Edit: I give my work keyboard a tip and tap once a week or so and have been asked why I do it. I explained it's basically a hygeine thing, explaining why, and was told it's disgusting. Encouraged colleagues to do it and they were mortified with the mess left on their desks. It was like they just dealt with the consequences of opening up their car engine after neglecting to oil change for 150,000 miles.
WHO'S DISGUSTING NOW????
They can try take the high road, but I've seen how many icons are on their desktops, so I basically know how messy their bedroom floor is.
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You all are making me feel ancient.
Now let’s talk about losing the ball and having to fish it out from under the fridge.
The image doesn't show the fingernail scrape technique on the wheels that the ball drives. That cotton swap isn't going to get that off you need some elbow grease and a fingernail!
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I use a trackball and clean mine every few days. It just takes a quick swipe of the rollers though no soap or anything crazy.
I have a trackball. I still clean it once a week. I've never washed the ball itself though. Maybe roll it across my shirt. I just take a pencil eraser to the rollers in the ball cavity.
There's no mouse I'd rather have. Being a Mac user, I mean, almost every mouse is better than Apple's. I'm not even talking about the charging port on the bottom. Charge it at night when you're not using it, it doesn't matter. It's just ugly and looks uncomfortable to use. Now the Magic Trackpad... yeah, I could get used to that. But I'd rather have my trackball when precision matters.
Being a Mac user, I mean, almost every mouse is better than Apple’s. I’m not even talking about the charging port on the bottom
fucking... "It just works^TM^" my ass.
"It just works" was always bullshit marketing drivel. Even long-time Mac users didn't swear by it. No computer "just works." They all have a learning curve. Most of them make dumb-ass decisions. I like Macs, but it's not like Macs are perfect and PCs are complete dogshit. I use a Windows 11 machine at work and I enjoy working with it for the most part. (To be fair, Copilot is disabled by IT, so it's not full fat Windows 11.) I do like my Mac more, but there are some things Windows machines do better. By the same token, yeah, it kind of does just work, but so does Windows. So does Linux. So does Android. Your computer/device doesn't get brownie points for doing its fucking job. It gets brownie points for the things that make you miss it when you're using another one. And they all have those.
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Well, I still use trackball mice for my day job sooo.
Although I didn't wipe the balls because it'll get rid of my sweet sweet skin oil buildup.
Btw, why was there a ball, not just a horizontal and vertical wheely on the base?
Because the ball rolls smoothly in any direction. The wheels do not roll at all parallel to their axles, they just slide which is not as smooth.
Just wheelies wouldn't be able to handle diagonal movement. The mouse would kind of scrape as it tried to move in non-aligned directions.
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Did anyone actually clean their mice like this?
Id get in there with my child fingers and scratch the wad of gunk off. Usually id end up wedging it in the housing but thats my dad's problem.
Yeah, you kinda had to at a certain point, the gunk would inhibit the ball from rolling freely.
There was always a kind of lint that would develop on the wheel inside. I've got no idea what it was made out of.
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I remember cleaning the ball once or twice, yes, when it got too bad to ignore.
Mostly the gunk accumulated on the rollers, though (and under the mouse, like in optical ones), and that was easier and faster to just scratch off with your nail... except for the little third wheel (seen on the bottom left picture) that kept the ball centered, of course, because that one wasn't only smaller but on a spring, making it almost impossible to scratch the gunk off of.
There was also the occasional hair tangled up on a roller, of course, which was almost impossible to remove. Those you just pushed aside onto the roller's axle and hoped the mouse would die of some electrical failure before the poor thing got too full of hair to roll.
Yes.
Scratch blow close 9/10. (With a personal mouse. Computer lab mice had clearly seen some things and needed the alcohol.)
Modern equivalent is having to hunt a stray hair out of the sensor hole.
are you talking about your penis again?
IT support in some cube-hell tower.
Waiting for a program to install/update, grab a pencil and break the gunk and hair off the rollers.
Ball-mice were awesome for 180 turns in FPS games too, the mouse-flick was a quality move.
I used to hate optical mice, when they first came out, as they were nowhere as accurate for aiming in FPS games. At least for me.
I do sometimes wonder if there's a company somewhere keeping ball mice alive, and how well they perform today.
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