The Mouse Is Dead - Long Live The Mouse (Logitech Optical Mouse)

Member Name: Teena2003

Product:	Logitech Optical Mouse
Date:	29/03/04 (138 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: long lasting, hard wearing

Disadvantages: corded

I?ve had a Logitech optical mouse for over 4 years. It worked like a dream, never had any problems and lasted longer than two of my previous computers. In fact this is now the third computer it is connected to and it was still going strong, just like on the first day.

I bought it at PC World and at the time it must have cost about £30. You can probably pick this particular model up for around £15 now, depending on where you buy.

As far as I remember it came in one of the typical Logitech boxes, white and green in colour. I have never really understood why these tiny mice always come in huge boxes. Most of it is empty and rubbish could be reduced if the box was smaller. But never mind.

Nowadays you can get mice in a variety of colours, when I bought mine, most mice were only available in one or two colours, shades of dirty white/grey or if you were lucky, black.

The choice of optical mice was very limited all those years ago, everyone still seemed to buy roller ball mice for their computer and even new ones only ever arrived with the old fashioned style.

I didn?t like the balls. They always got dirty and needed a lot of looking after and I went through a large number of mice before I decided I had enough of the blooming ball and bought an optical mouse.

And there were only two on offer I could choose from, either Microsoft or Logitech. I bought the Logitech one, I liked the colour. Gosh, that sounded really girly just now.

The mouse is mainly blue with two grey buttons, a grey wheel and the Logitech logo on it.

The underside is smooth and the little red optical light shines through the side and lights up every time I move it. And it is ever so precise. I used a lot of ordinary mouse pads but it also works on paper, worktops and many other surf
aces as long as they are smooth. There are special optical mouse pads available now to make sure that the light is directed in the correct direction, hence making it even faster and more accurate.

After all these years of daily use, the mouse still looks pretty good. The blue back might be a little shinier than at the beginning from constant touching and the two grey buttons have slight marks where my fingertips touched for the past four years. But otherwise it still looks great.

And it is a strong little thing. I have managed to sit on it, step on it, drop it and even accidentally crashed it into the wall once and it is still working. A very forgiving mouse, if there ever was one. Oh, and it didn?t mind when I tipped my coffee over on more than one occasion and it had to do breaststrokes to get out of the little lake that had formed underneath it.

Plugging the mouse into the computer was simple. You were given a choice, either use a USB or P/S port. If you went with the second option, a little green adapter was included, to make sure you plugged it into the port of the same colour. Not that it would have fitted anywhere else anyway but you never know how clever people are when attaching things to computers.

I always had my mouse connected to the P/S port. My older computers only had two USB ports and with a plethora of machines attached to the computer I couldn?t afford to lose on to the mouse. And I wasn?t prepared to buy a USB extension thingy to add more ports.

The mouse can be used by left and right handed people as it is designed in a way to sit on either side of the computer. It hasn?t got and moulds or grooves like the ones you can buy now, just a clean basic little design.

I?ve always found it very comfortable to work with, my fingers reached both buttons without p
roblems. And even the wheel in the middle was easy to work.

In the set up of your computer you can actually allocate your favourite settings to your mouse, adjust the buttons to do what you want them to do.

The wheel button in the middle I mainly use to scroll down pages. I set it to advance three lines every time I move the wheel and it saves a lot of time when checking on long pages of text or web pages. There are other settings, one line at a time or even a whole page but I prefer to have control over how far I want to go down a page and not have the mouse make the decision for me.

The software that comes with the mouse lets you work with the wheel even more, in particular when it comes to the Internet but I have never really needed it so I didn?t bother to set up the wheel for that. I need it for scrolling and that?s what it?s best at.

But recently, after working without problems for all those years, I noticed that I had problems with the mouse. It didn?t move around the mat properly, got stuck and didn?t want to budge. I thought it might be a little dirty, so I wiped the underside. It seemed to cure it for a couple of hours.

Then the buttons began to play up and I couldn?t drag and drop any longer. I need my computer for work and use it all day long so I couldn?t afford my mouse to die on me.

With a heavy heart I decided to retire my trusty little blue gem and buy a new one. It definitely had to be optical but I didn?t care whether it was corded or cordless. I went to the shop and came back with a replacement Logitech, ready to pull the plug on the old one.

Then a sudden flash of inspiration hit me. My new computer has 6 USB ports and I had never tried to plug it into there. There was still room, I removed it from the P/S port and
pushed the old mouse into a free USB port. It instantly sprang into action.
I couldn?t believe my eyes. It was like a new lease of life for the old gem. It moves like there had never been any problems at all, it drags and drops, double clicks, highlights anything from one letter to passages and is as accurate ever.

I hope that this little mouse will be with me for a long time to come. It might not be the latest model on the market and still have the silly cord but I don?t mind. Until there really is a need for a new mouse, this one will always be my very favourite.

Of course, the brand new mouse went back to the shop for a refund. There was no need to connect it after I had worked out what was actually wrong with the old one.

Thanks for reading.

© Minnitee/Teena2003

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