I have an old microsoft wireless ball mouse, i have the dongle but it has ps/2 connectors (i know about ps/2 to usb but i dont want to use it as the dongle is big). Is there way to use a usb wifi card(tp-link) as the reciever and make it work?
Is there way to use a usb wifi card(tp-link) as the reciever and make it work?
No. The mouse is not a wifi device, and as it’s a old one I doubt it’ll support bluetooth either. So you really need the original dongle.
Do you super-love this particular mouse, or just want to save a few bucks not getting a new mouse? I mean, different solutions make sense for each scenario.
Its neat, ambidextrous and was actually sealed just a year ago so the old mice is new and i want to use it, it also came bundled with a keyboard but thats in use and i want to use the mouse separately
Okay.
Personally, I would just get a new mouse, because you can definitely get a new ambidextrous wireless mouse with side buttons for a lot less than I’d consider the work involved with this being worth it to me.
If you really strongly want to do this, two possible routes:
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You don’t actually need the PS/2 plug, just the chips and electrical connections. Dissassemble the PS/2 dongle and a PS/2 to USB adapter and rewire them into a smaller form factor that you’re comfortable carrying around with your laptop.
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Rip out some or all of the internals of the mouse and replace them with internals from a newer, Bluetooth-compatible mouse that uses the same encoders that are encoding the ball’s movements, assuming such a thing is out there. That won’t give you the same mouse, but it’ll give you something that has the same external feel. The shape will be the same, it’ll click the same way, and it’ll have the same rolling feel when moving.
Finally, a partial solution: it sounds like your concern with the dongle plus adapter is mostly that you don’t want to carry more components with your laptop.
If you regularly carry other USB peripherals, you can just bundle them up with a USB hub and the dongle and then just have one box that you plug into your laptop. That might mitigate the issue of carrying the dongle, or might not. Depends on what it is that’s problematic for you – a lot of parts or the bulk of extra components.
At one point in the past, I had an optical trackball with a translucent pink ball that I wanted to use in a dark room. The red LED was really disruptive, and while an opaque ball would have mitigated it a bit, it still would have shown around the edges. The fact that it went to sleep when being inactive and then woke up when moved, changing in brightness, made it annoying as hell. Those optical sensors can also see into the near-infrared, so I took a gamble and ripped out the red LED and put in an infrared LED. It mostly worked, except the sensitivity was reduced enough that when it was in sleep mode, any movement wasn’t enough to reliably wake it up. I dug up the datasheet for the chip, found the pin that sent it into sleep mode, and wired it to the high voltage pin so that it never slept. That worked fine. All that being said, while it was satisfying to have it work, the only reason I was willing to to it was because I couldn’t just buy an optical, off-the-shelf trackball at the time that didn’t shine a red light all over. It simply would have made no financial sense to put the time and money into doing the modifications otherwise. In this situation, if there’s an off-the-shelf product that does what you want, I’d probably drop the mouse off with Goodwill or similar if you don’t want to toss it in the trash – maybe someone out there does want a mint condition PS/2 wireless mouse – and just buy the new mouse.
The dongle is a unifying reciever for a keyboard and mouse combo, the keyboard is being used, i want to use the mouse separately Also the dongle is bigger than the mouse .
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I was thinking the same thing. Unless I really liked the feel the outdated tech usually is improved on and easier use than a work around to make the old tech still work.
I can understand holding on to a classic Mac mouse or something like that, but the mouse you have is pretty much generic 90s/early 2000s disposable garbage that’s nothing special.
Its nice ambidextrous and has side buttons
Microsoft mouse used to be absolutely top notch back then. It truly was one of their best products. I was a mac guy back then, you know when it was not popular at all, and I used an M$ Intellimouse, they were the best.
Yes!! I used Linux back then (still do) and I absolutely hated M$, but I loved the Intellimouse.
I was also on BeOS, NetBSD, and various Linux distros like YellowDog :)
NetBSD was the best cause it was the only distro with a native bootloader for the OpenFirmware which meant it didn’t require a MacOS partition to kexec into a different kernel.
Good times!
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Cut the ends and wire it to USB connector directly. No dongle
The dongle is huge (almost as big as the mouse) its not really suitable to attach to a laptop
No dongle. If it works to usb, you can put a USB connection on the end. Multi meter and soldering iron.
Wireless module is big
That only works sometimes. Many receivers are only PS/2 compatible, especially older ones.
They mention it works with the dongle but they main thing is that it’s too big.
