A Microsoft Product I Didn't Object To Buying (Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse)

Member Name: Nibelung

Product:	Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse
Date:	16/11/05 (537 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Adios wires and mouse mat. Well built - battery life. Works on most textured or patterned surfaces

Disadvantages: Possible interference if near another. Won't work on featureless surfaces, e,g, plain glass

It’s nice to be writing about a Micro$oft product that’s a) good and b) something you weren’t more or less forced to buy.

It also makes a change to be writing about something one year down the line from buying it, rather than having barely unwrapped it and got to grips with it. At least this way you’ll know if it’s built to last to any great extent.

Let’s face it; with the exception of Apple Mac users and those stalwarts who have seen the delights of Linux, Uncle Bill & Co. have more or less got a de facto monopoly of the operating systems market.

However much I dislike this situation, I have to admit that in the hardware field, where more obvious competition exists, they also have very good products, in this case, a ‘wireless optical mouse’.

I’ve been a user and proponent of optical mice (as opposed to the ‘Three Blind’ variety) for quite some time now. The advantage of never having to de-fluff any balls and the ability to use most smooth surfaces instead of the confines of a mouse mat make them very useful bits of kit.

I’ve also dabbled with wireless rodents too, although my first purchase kept locking up after about 30 minutes use. Perhaps the £14 price tag was something to do with it!

A while back, my wife has been having to have ‘physio’ on her right shoulder which the doctor thinks might be down to years of writing on chalkboards as a teacher, and more recently, years of using a mouse at arms length.

Remembering that the optical mice I’ve had have always seemed to work even on your own trouser leg, being only constrained by the length of the lead, I set about replacing our ‘long-binned’ wireless optical mouse, resolving maybe to spend a bit more on it this time.

This is where www.dabs.com and The Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse 2.0 came in. Paying £33.48 including p/p about a year ago now, it fulfilled my two main criteria. It cost a bit more without being outrageous it and had a three year warranty, promising, or at least hinting at, better reliability.

The mouse is available in three ‘colourways’, Blue Moon, Steel Blue and Metallic Red. I really didn’t mind, but www.dabs.com’s stock situation steered me towards Moon Blue, and having received it, I was quite glad about that.

APPEARANCE

The mouse itself is two-tone, with a dark metallic blue central panel in that ‘fish scale’ pattern that’s supposed to make you think it’s carbon-fibre, like those various dashboard bits that sports cars are sprouting these days. The two main buttons are the same colour without the scales. The scrolling wheel is grey and the rest, including the shaped side panels, is either a very dark blue, or it’s actually black; I can’t decide.

The body of the mouse is symmetrical about its centre line so it’s not biased towards right-handers (or ‘lefties’ like me).

The transmitter is all black with just one green LED for relief, which flashes to show it’s searching for a mouse, and goes steady when it has.

FEATURES

Despite appearing to be only a two-button mouse with a central scrolling wheel, the wheel performs three other button functions. A downward pressure gives the third button function, and clicking it from side to side give ‘sideways scrolling’, which to me sounds a little erroneous, like having hair that recedes forwards.

Terminology aside, it really is versatile, especially once you’ve set up the Intellipoint v 5.0 software that comes on CD-ROM with the mouse. Here you can customise speed of movement to suit yourself and your screen size. This software also provides for alternative ‘themes’ for the look of your cursor etc, and you can arrange to leave a fading trail of cursors; useful if you’ve got a particularly lazy laptop screen where the cursor is prone to ‘submarining’, i.e. disappearing only to surface once your hand comes to rest.

SET UP

There’s not really much to say. You unpack it, and put batteries in it (two alkaline AAs supplied). You plug the transmitter in where you’d normal plug a mouse in the back of your PC. This caters for either the little 6-pin PS/2 socket or an increasingly more common USB port. The adapter is a little bulky for those using a PS/2 plug as it sits on the end of the USB plug, but since it will probably be out of sight around the back of the PC, appearance is not that important. However, the combined plug is quite long in this configuration, so just make sure you don’t ram it against a wall, when putting the PC back into position.

Oh yes, THEN you bother to read the instructions!

Fortunately, the instinctive approach is not a million miles from the party line either. In fact the daunting manual can be stripped down to a few pages in your own language.

If, on rebooting your PC, the mouse doesn’t seem to work, you can prod the radio link into life with a button on the transmitter, followed by a recessed button under the mouse which causes it to experiment with radio frequencies and locks onto the first successful one. One small point – theses waves carry about 6-8 feet, so don’t operate in close proximity to another mouse of the same type - you might get very confused. I suppose I just got lucky that my neighbour, whose PC sits through the adjoining wall from mine isn’t using one, or we’d be getting some pretty odd goings-on by now!

IN USE

I took to this like a duck to water. Well, actually, there’s very little to get used to. Its speed of movement across the screen was entirely what I was expecting, needing no adjustment. The two main buttons seem to have just the right amount of resistive pressure before yielding to a click. The scroll wheel feels a little odd, in that its utterly smooth with no sound or clicking sensation. Its movement is pleasantly damped, like the focussing ring on a camera lens. The sideways clicks are…well, they’re sideways clicks, needing very little pressure, which is just as well as this is not a natural motion for the index finger.

I really do have to commend Micro$oft on battery life. My mouse is still running on its first set a year later, so initial worries about getting locked out from a vital 15-page document just before you saved it are unfounded – OK, I’m starting to get dire warnings from the software that the mouse’s transmission are getting low, but I’m half inclined, (for research purposes of course) to see how far I can push my luck. Anyway, if you get used to the alternative ways of using menus, this wouldn’t be a problem.

Another nifty feature is that the mouse will run on one battery, so if you only take them out one by one, you don’t lose access to your PC.

Summing up, I’m impressed. I just wish that other Micro$oft products didn’t leave me feeling that I’d been ripped off – nearly 400 quid for Office, what’s that all about then?

Summary: Totally cordless mouse, with optical sensors, so able to work on wide variety of surfaces

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