Editing Maintenance/Mouse button replacement (section)

== Pop the hood<ref>I don't own a car nor do I condone their use but did I grow up in California, USA so everything comes with a car metaphor.</ref> ==
[[File:Mouse in original condition.jpg|thumb|Something's rotten about these microswitches]]
I started the repair by measuring missed clicks with the linux utility <code>xev</code> <ref>https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/man/man1/xev.1.xhtml</ref>, which showed that the buttons had become sensitive to the exact orientation of my finger.  Only a downward-and-rightwards press would have an effect.  Either something was wrong with the alignment of the broken plastic parts, contact material was worn off of the internal switch, dust sand and chips had gotten into the sealed part, or all of the above.  First thing to do is just to disassemble and reassemble.  Next, I cleaned it by wiping out the stray lint, squirting canned air at all the moving parts and flooding the heart of the buttons with isopropyl alcohol, finishing off the routine by squinting my eyes and imagining very hard that I had fixed the issue, yet nothing changed.  Even with the cover off, the buttons behaved badly.

Still feeling stubborn though beginning to accept fate, I planned to replace the standard microswitches, the little silver squares with an orange dot in the middle which are pressed by plastic stems inside of the buttons.  These switches come in exactly the same vanilla flavor that has been made since long before this particular mouse was dreamed up ten years ago.  All 8 solder points are accessible as you might see in this image, so it shouldn't be a challenging fix.

I was able to confirm that the switches have the same pinout and footprint as their potential replacements, although the proof will not be definitively in the pudding until the switches are isolated from their circuit.

Two fellow Earth defenders on my office's IT Team ordered the new switches and encouraged my bravado, and I barely remember the next couple of weeks of missed clicks.
[[File:Desoldering a mouse microswitch.jpg|thumb|Prying the switches off]]