The Wacom Intuos 3 Mouse sucks, so they say. A quick look over of Amazon reviews would have you believe that this mouse is a light-weight in terms of serious use. As an owner and daily user of the Wacom mouse for the last three years, I’ve been quite satisfied with it’s durability. So if it were not for recent problems, I never would have stumbled across all of the negative reviews.
Ok, what’s wrong with the mouse or in other words, what problems are people reporting? Basically there were two main gremlins: 1. the felt material on the bottom of the mouse is not durable and 2. after a period of time the mouse starts to have issues with clicking. This exhibits itself in two symptoms, the mouse not registering clicks, or the mouse registering more clicks than what were performed and my mouse had both problems. For example, about a six months ago, the right button stopped working. If you’re a Mac user, you can get by pressing the control key (sorry if I got the key wrong I’m using an IBM Model M with my Mac Pro), plus the left mouse button and that will bring up the right-click menu. Finally, last week the left mouse button started producing double clicks. This is a huge hassle when trying to delete mail in Mac Mail and you delete something you wanted to save.
But perhaps the problem isn’t really the mouse. It’s been suggested that updating drivers helps as well as keeping the felt on the bottom clean. But what if you still have problems? Maybe the problem is that you can’t open it up and give it a good cleaning out. Anyways here are the steps I’ve done to get my little Wacom Intuos3 Mouse working again.
Here, a hole was drilled to access the Intuos 3's one screw. Later, the hole was cleaned up.
Step one: The five button Intuos 3 mouse has one phillips screw, located on the bottom of the mouse, centered (left to right) and towards the back of the mouse. So you’ll want to peel back the felt, little by little (to prevent tearing), until you see the screw hole. You’ll also notice that as you peel back the felt, there is a clear plastic cover over the screw hole.
I wasn’t interested in trying to peel up this layer and opted to drill an access hole to get to the screw. Be careful whatever route you go.
Go to Part II of How to Clean the Wacom Intuos 3 Mouse, go back to Frugal Tips, or go to Frugal Living Home.
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