Mouse Clix

By: Hobie Lunin

Keep your wits about you!

That was the admonition from my Mom when I was young. She meant that you need to stay “tuned in” to what you are doing, in order to catch any problem that comes along. This is good advice to the computer user. Below are a few illustrations.

A student is working in the word processor and suddenly sees a menu pop-up. “What happened? What is this?” The student has inadvertently clicked the right mouse button with the middle finger. You must stay tuned to those sensations in your fingers on the mouse so you know when you are clicking. This becomes automatic at some point but you must remain conscious of it until then.

Another question is the one about “why is the start button is at the top of the screen and not at the bottom where it was?” Another case of the same thing. The computer user has moved their hand up and down when on the desktop, trying to find the cursor (arrow), and has their index finger resting on the left button hard enough to drag the task bar to a new position.

Another instance is when someone says that they clicked on one thing but got something else. Be aware that the “point” of the arrow is what is important and not the back end of the arrow (cursor).

Akin to ”keeping your wits about you” is “patience is a wonderful gift!” This is very evident when you are waiting for your computer to do something and then in your impatience you click something else instead. This normally gives the computer something more to do at the same time and many computers, especially older ones, will just freeze up at that point.

If you are in a hurry, you can often create more problems that you can solve. If you are rushed and need to get off your computer quickly to do something else, you can save time and possible problems caused by rushing through the shut down procedure. It is easier to just leave the computer on and shut the monitor off. The computer can stay in that mode indefinitely. You can just turn the monitor back on to continue later. If the monitor comes up blank, you may have to jiggle your mouse as well, depending upon how your screen saver or energy saving features are set. You must, however, remember you have done this, as you may just hit the computer on/off button and shut the computer off!

If you are doing some editing and have put something in “clipboard” by either cutting it or pasting it, remember that it is there as you perform any intermediate functions. If you copy or cut anything else, you may lose the item you had put in clipboard previously.

Now here was an interesting case. A student reported that the address window in her browser was missing. You may remember that the browser is the software that allows you to “see” what is on the Internet and has a field (small window) in which you type the “www.address” you want to see. Well, how can you lose it? It is hard to tell exactly what happened, but I assume a careless click on “view” would have brought up a “drop-down” menu. I would guess when the student saw it; she clicked on it to (hopefully) make it go away. She must have clicked while pointing to “show” (this was in Netscape) and then clicked on “location toolbar”. This would have made the address window disappear. By reversing the process I restored it immediately as, basically, that’s the only way to “lose” your address window in your browser without doing it intentionally. You can relocate it by accidentally dragging it, but it would have appeared somewhere else on the screen.

When you are working on your computer and see a few buttons to choose from, please take the time to think about the consequences of clicking on any button. Often that will permit you to engage the computer with your brain in gear and prevent you from clicking on the “wrong” button. This is particularly true if you are in new territory and are not sure as to what to do. It is true that it is very difficult to “hurt” your computer by making operator errors but, on the other hand, it is very easy to lose data you wanted to save by not keeping alert.

In the instances of my own errors, I find that sometimes I click without thinking. This is especially true when I only want to minimize something so that it appears on the task bar, and will thus be readily available again. I often just (absent mindedly) click it off, causing me to go through a long procedure involving, at times, putting in a password, to get the screen back. In addition, as with many of us I am afraid, I get impatient and click on something too soon resulting in a freeze up and lost time or even lost data while I reboot.

The last case in point is when you find that the window has changed its shape such that it is making it hard for you to see what you want. In the actual case, the computer user was not able to see his mail as it was being obscured by another window. This was a case of inadvertently dragging the edge of the window such that the window became very narrow. To do this intentionally, you hover your cursor over the edge of the window until it turns into a double ended arrow and then click and drag it. . This can easily be done unwittingly if your index finger is touching the mouse button a little too hard.

Hobie Lunin is a computer instructor and consultant and can be reached at mousexlix2@yahoo.com. Previous articles are at http://mouseclix.tripod.com