Optical is the ONLY way to go. (Microsoft Wheel Mouse Optical)

Member Name: Ten98

Product:	Microsoft Wheel Mouse Optical
Date:	29/04/02 (71 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very hard wearing, never loses accuracy, never needs cleaning

Disadvantages: Expensive

If you've ever used a standard ball mouse for a long period of time, you will know how irritating they can be. After a while they tend to get gunged up and stop working properly, which means opening it up, removing the gunk and putting it back together again. And it never works as good as it did when it was new, right? The design of the mouse has hardly changed since it's invention in the 70's... Until now.

Enter the optical mouse. It's true that this technology has existed for a while, Logitech had an optical trackball years and years ago, it's only recently though that the technology has really come of age, and it took Microsoft to do it. Forget the competition with all the unneccesary extra buttons or space age blue lights. The MS mouse has long been the standard in long lasting comfortable design.

The mouse works by shining a red light down in front of a light sensor on the bottom of the mouse, meaning any movement can be registered and passed back to the PC. You don't even have to touch the surface, you can actually hover the mouse a few millimetres off your desk and it will still work. No need for a mousemat, you can use your desk, your carpet, the arm of your chair or anything you want, provided it's not too shiny. The only moving parts are the buttons on top and the scroll wheel which are manufactured to Microsoft's highest standards.

After the novelty wears off though, what actual benefits does this fancy light sensing technology bring though you ask? Well I'll tell you. For one thing, these babies simply do not wear out. I've had mine for over 6 months now, if I was using a standard ball mouse that equates to about 12 de-gungings and some serious loss of accuracy, I'd probably be coming up for a replacement. But no, it's still running as perfectly and as smoothly as when I first bought it.

The mouse is much lighter than a normal ball type mouse, and you don't have to wo
rk against the friction of the ball rotating inside, so the effort involved in guiding that little arrow becomes almost non-existant.

There are other optical mice out there, but I find extra buttons just get in the way. This mouse has 2 buttons, a wheel and a third button effected by pressing down on the wheel. Any more than that seems a bit unnecesary and actually gets in the way.

The mouse is USB, but a nifty little adapter is provided for a PS/2 connection for those of you without USB or for those of you with operating systems that don't support USB devices.

The only critisism you might be able to have about this mouse is the price. Well think about how many times you've had to replace your old style ball mice over the years. If you take care of it, this will never need to be replaced.

There really is no excuse for anyone to be using the arcane technlogy of balls and rollers any more, so upgrade now.

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