Desperately Seeking Mouseball (Microsoft Intellimouse)

Member Name: MykReeve

Product:	Microsoft Intellimouse
Date:	10/02/01 (181 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Use any textured surface as a mouse pad, no need to clean out its insides, good ergonomic design, three year warranty

Disadvantages: Mine packed up after only a few months, went wrong in a worrying and spectacularly unpredictable way, quite expensive compared to simpler balled-mouse designs

I bought my current PC back in early 1997, and it came with a standard Microsoft ball-driven wheel mouse. That lasted pretty well, in fact, it lasted for over three years. I consider that pretty good longevity for a computer part, especially in this age of throwaway peripherals. However, all good things must come to an end, and eventually my old trusty ball-bearing mouse died, in early June 2000.

So, wanting an immediate replacement (yes, I have no patience), I marched down to PC World to buy a replacement. I knew that I wanted to buy a Microsoft mouse to replace the deceased one, to reward them for the reliability of my old one. I was disappointed to find that PC World didn't stock any Microsoft computer mice like my old one, just the new laser bearing mice – the IntelliMouse series. Being a creature of little cash, I opted for the cheapest of those on offer, the bog-standard "IntelliMouse with IntelliEye".

FEATURES

The shape of the mouse was exactly identical with the one that I bought it to replace. It's a good ergonomic shape, with a raised back that fit into the palm of my hand well. It had a wheel middle button too, just like the one I'd bought it to replace. All in all, to look at the upper side of the mouse, it wasn't any different from my old mouse. The difference lay underneath.

Yes, instead of the old ball, the IntelliEye-bearing IntelliMouse operates using a laser directed at the surface it's running on. A digital camera takes 1,500 pictures per second of the surface, which are analysed using a digital signal processor, and translated into movement of the mouse cursor on the computer screen. As you can tell, it's a very complicated piece of kit, and there's a lot of calculation going on in the body of the little unit. It's an interesting way to eliminate the problem of having to clean out the ball of the mouse, and it has the intriguing feature of allowing you to run the
mouse on any textured surface, including the leg of your trousers.

But, I don't know about anyone else, but the idea does seem something like overkill to me. It smacks of moving the mountain to Mohammed, when I'd have been quite happy to buy Mohammed a ticket on the Highland express bus. Having said that, the price of the mouse really isn't excessive given the complexity of the calculations taking place inside it.

MY EXPERIENCES

At first, I had no problems with the mouse. The software included installed without any problems, and I was soon off and away moving my mouse cursor all over the screen without problems. Yes, for almost six months, I had no problems whatsoever with the mouse. Occasionally a stray hair or bit of material would get in the way of the camera, and the cursor would fail to respond to mouse movement, but cleaning was (as promised, on the packaging) exceptionally easy, just a case of brushing the obstruction away from the camera.

However, some six months after purchasing the mouse, the cursor began jerking about sporadically. It initially manifested itself as minor twitches, so that when I moved the cursor in a circle, it would twitch about slightly, moving in a very angular circle. Only a minor problem really, but it made fine movements of the cursor all but impossible. Over the following weeks, the problem increased, becoming ever more unpredictable, to the extent that minor movements of the mouse could lead to no movement of the cursor, or a sickening lurch to the other side of the screen.

As if this wasn't enough, sometimes the mouse would behave as though a button had been pressed, even when it hadn't. My particular favourite was when the mouse "decided" that I wanted to move the cursor to the bottom-left hand corner of the screen, press the right button, and select "Tile Horizontally". Quite a complex series of movements there... and not the sort of series of
movements I'm likely to have accidentally carried out! It's hardly the sort of "precision" that Microsoft yell about with the IntelliEye system!

When these problems started occurring, I assumed that there was something else at fault. Surely it couldn't be the mouse causing all these problems? There must be some sort of interrupt conflict, or perhaps a driver has corrupted itself. I tried reinstalling the IntelliMouse software, I reinstalled all the software that I'd recently installed, I even tried downloading updated drivers for most of my hardware from the web (using keyboard, because of the unpredictable and uncontrollable mouse movements). Actually, it was more or less at this point that I realised how unnavigable most web-sites are without a mouse, but that's by the by. Anyway, needless to say, numerous reinstallations and drivers downloaded later, I still had an unpredictable, and uncontrollable mouse.

In fact, the mouse continued to deteriorate. It got so bad that sometimes the cursor would freeze completely, and the keyboard would stop working too, so I couldn't even restart my computer.

Obviously, once the mouse began to misbehave so badly, and I was pretty sure I'd ruled out anything else, my first instinct was to poke about inside it. I've poked about inside conventional wheel mice, and fixed problems with them (usually by removing accumulated crud from the workings, admittedly), so I was anxious to have a little explore inside my new mouse. However, that was not to be – the unit is very rigidly constructed, and opening it without ripping off stickers and breaking the plastic casing is nigh on impossible.

So, I went out and bought a generic wheel ball-based mouse, a cheap one, to see if this would resolve all of my mouse-related woes. It did. One quick restart of the computer, and the machine was back to normal, as if nothing had ever gone wrong.

CONCLUSIONS


OK, the idea's nice, but in my experience, the engineering's just not up to it. I paid a little under three times what I would pay for a conventional ball-based mouse for this laser-bearing gizmo, and the mouse lasted about six times shorter than its predecessor did. Admittedly, when the mouse was still working, it worked well, and I had no problems with it, but when it went wrong, it went wrong in a spectacular and unpredictable way.

Needless to say, I'll be popping down to PC World to demand a replacement (the mouse comes with a three-year hardware warranty), though I plan to keep it in reserve for when my new ball-based mouse dies, rather than using it immediately.

The advantage of being able to use any textured surface as a mouse pad is a nice one, but I can't say it's one that I really needed. The lack of any moving parts did reduce the need to clean out the mouse so often, and that's definitely a welcome feature. However, if it comes at the expense of a reliable and durable mouse structure, as my experiences suggest, then I can't help thinking that it's one that's not worth investing in until they've ironed out all the bugs.

Summary: