How is it possible for an electronic device to degrade to the point of being unusable in 6 months? I dun get it.

I have no clue, but I know for a fact that my 2020s are tracking much much worse than they were out of the box.

It could possibly be that you have a hair or something of the sort stuck on your mouse sensor. Maybe the poor tracking could even be caused by a dirty mouse pad.

I tried to clean the sensor and the mousepad, there doesn't seem to be anything noticeable under the sensor. The mousepad is the fatal1ty black cloth pad, which I have never cleaned for what must have been almost a year now. I don't know what's the proper way to clean it so I never tried, although all my other mice track fine on it.

The 2020 skips in every direction on the fat pad right now, it doesn't detect slow movements over a small distance, and when I move it moderately fast at a constant speed, it makes a leap, then stops, then makes another leap and so on. There's a discovery I made, however. The mouse tracks okay when I removed the mouse pad. My table is wooden one coated with white paint. But it has some black scratches/little holes in it, so that's not a good solution, those places do impede the cursor when I come cross them. Thinking the surface must be making a difference, I tried it on a razer mantis(?) aluminum pad, the 2020 does even worse on that thing. It basically skips twice as bad as it does on the fat pad.

So does anyone have ideas what kind of pads would be good for a 2020? A sensor swap would still be the prefered solution though. Even on the table, it will still skip if I move it fast enough, which will never happen with razer salmosa. I know the ESR community are very knowledgeable about consumer electronics. Even if you have nothing to comment on modding this particular mouse, maybe you guys can post a few links to other specialized websites/forums and point me to the right direction?

Thanks

The insides of the 2020 are a very tight fit, I had to hack the mouse to bits to even fit decent mouse buttons to replace the terrible left/right buttons. The Salmosa insides might go in, but getting the sensor aligned will be difficult, and you'll lose the use of the thumb button, if that matters. I think there was a smaller salmosa released in the Chinese market, maybe the inside of one of those will fit better.

No idea why the 2020 sensor is breaking for you, maybe the plastic lens that sits between the pcb and the bottom of the mouse has become dislodged slightly; taking it to bits and putting it back together might help, but I doubt it.

Hate to say it, but your best bet is probably to just get used to one of your other mice. I loved my 1010 (less so the 2020 i reviewed on esr somewhere), but their annoyingly terrible hardware wore me down and I threw them away. Even 3 years later I still get annoyed at the thought of how badly Creative fucked the mouse up :]