With more and more mouses adopting the optical sensors instead of the conventional mouse balls I decided to invest in one as my old mouse was really getting on my nerves. The Microsoft Optical mouse claims to be "smooth, reliable, precise and durable" and so far it has fulfilled all its claims.

Immediately I noticed that this mouse is more accurate than the mice with mouse balls. The mouse is also capable of being used on all sorts of surfaces with no loss in accuracy. The mouse also looks good and the silver finish adds a touch of mouse to it. The scroll feature is also very useful but is not a new technology as most conventional mouse ball mice now come equipped with the scroll feature which makes browsing the web easier.

Although it is an all round excellent solution the mouse also has one or two problems which let it down. Firstly the mouse has two navigation buttons which I find very useful for using as "back" and "forward" keys but occasionally my hand knocks the forward key unintentionally and this gets annoying after a while. When the computer is also off one of the two LEDs also remains on and although this is not a problem with me I have read in newsgroups that some people find it very annoying and I believe the only solution to prevent the second LED from coming on is to cut it off!!

I purchased this mouse in a package deal with the Internet Keyboard Pro from Microsoft and for £47 in total (from dabs.com) I believe it is an excellent deal featuring two excellent products with a very long lifespan because the mouse has no moving parts to wear down.