You can just fix things
Nobody is stopping you
8/27/24
Recently I built a living room PC for gaming and general use. I decided to get a wireless mouse on Facebook Marketplace for $50, a Razer Basilisk Ultimate. It’s a nice mouse with a handy magnetic charging cradle, and worked very nicely save for one dealbreaking issue: the scroll wheel would occasionally scroll an extra increment when scrolling downward. This makes web browsing annoying and playing certain games a non-starter, though the seller gave me a refund and let me keep the mouse. It always feels awful to throw out mostly-working hardware, so I decided to take a stab at fixing it. What’s the worst that could happen? It’s already broken and the warranty had already expired a year after sale (roughly when you’d imagine this issue would occue, very late-stage-capitalism).
I’ve never opened up a mouse before, but I’ve installed various SD card slots replacing disk drives in my gaming consoles:
Maybe I’ll do a blog about that as an excuse to show off my collection… but the point being I had a general idea about the little things you’d see inside an electronic device. Ribbon cables, little plugs, stuff like that.
I followed a disassembly video and peeled off the back sticker to get at some hidden screws, jimmying the frame open to access the scroll wheel mechanism. The resistance for each scroll “bump” is provided by a spring-bound lever, like in the triggers of a game controller. I made sure to take careful pictures of before fully dismantling each pert of the scroll wheel, at which piont I realized I had no idea what to do next and reassembled the whole mouse.
I figured I’d see if it still works, and the issue was completely fixed! I must have reseated something that was misaligned? This was the best possible ending, and I saved myself the $90 I’d otherwise have spent buying a new one.
E-waste sucks, especially when it comes down to planned obsolescence or other forms of enshittification. The fact that this is only an option when, for example, the company doesn’t forcibly issue an update disable the product is a damn shame. It’s an inherent symptom of the handshake between impotent senators and C-suit ghouls we’re all resigned to. But that’s what makes it so rewarding to try fixing your broken thing and see what happens! Repairing things is fun and you should sieze any opportunity to deprive Jeff Bezos of his rent.
While there’s definitely times you might want to find an alternative (opening up CRTs is dangerous, and you shouldn’t be fixing your landlord’s appliances unless you personally benefit from it), it’s an option worth considering for the sake of saving money and/or developing a new hobby. I figured I’d write this to encourage others to try a new thing before tossing out perfectly good hardware.