Microsoft Notebook Optical Mouse 4000 - mouse

...Settle and that's where the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Optical Mouse 4000 (quicker to install than to say) comes into this sorry tale.

Well, it's only sorry as far as here. Once it arrived from Amazon, partly subsidised by a £10 voucher from 'yoonohoo.co.uk', there's been no looking back. The overall cost of ridding yourself of hassle'n'wires and de-fluffing your ..ahem…balls all in one fell swoop is a shade over £18.

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...my experience with a full-sized Microsoft wireless mouse, this doesn't happen very often but especially with a laptop, you'll wish you were near a battery shop when it does.

I now know what actually happens just before your battery 'craps-out' on you (sorry, but I believe that's the modern computer terminology). You'll be working in Excel or Access one day, wondering why all your tables are juddering, preventing you from pointing at ... more

As I've said before, Micro$oft might be THE organisation we love to hate when it comes to software, but they do make darned fine hardware, for example, keyboards, or in this case, mice.

It's difficult to get too excited about mice, or any other 'pointing device' as they are generically known, along with trackballs and the like.

It is however eminently possible to get mad at its predecessor and threaten to chuck it out of the window. I've had two such 'throwing my toys out of the pram' sessions lately.

One was whilst working to fix a friend's recalcitrant broadband access, battling with a normal 'ball-type' mouse that was well past its sell-by date. You don't know what you've got till it's gone, as they say, and coming back to one of these first-generation beasts was too much. I spent the first 30 minutes just trying to get it to work.

The other occasion was whilst working with my laptop on holiday, having found out that my current Targus optical mouse had developed a fault and was no longer recognised as a valid USB device. Six days with the laptop's 'slidy pad thingy' was enough to convince me that a new mouse was needed urgently, as the laptop would never survive the fall from the 1st floor window into the streets of downtown Settle and that's where the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Optical Mouse 4000 (quicker to install than to say) comes into this sorry tale.

Well, it's only sorry as far as here. Once it arrived from Amazon, partly subsidised by a £10 voucher from 'yoonohoo.co.uk', there's been no looking back. The overall cost of ridding yourself of hassle'n'wires and de-fluffing your ..ahem…balls all in one fell swoop is a shade over £18.

INITIAL THOUGHTS

What, you mean apart from 'how the hell do I get it open?'? The clear plastic bubble casing in which it arrived was bomb-proofed. If you had the slightest bit of arthritis in your wrists, you'd had to call the Fire Brigade to cut it open.

I had to cut right around the perimeter with very strong scissors to get at it.

However, hopefully, you only do that once!

The mouse itself is actually quite dull. It's largely grey - OK, 'two-tone' grey to be exact. It is however a tad smaller than your average mouse, but here's the neat bit. The USB transmitter stows away inside the base of the mouse when not in use. This latter component looks not unlike a 'bluetooth dongle' for those of you that know what one of those is, having a USB plug and an LED or two to show it's in operation.

GETTING IT GOING

Having pulled the USB transmitter out from its kennel, you need to insert the single AA alkaline battery (supplied) into the mouse. The transmitter needs no extra power as it gets its feed from the laptop.

Of course, I suppose I COULD have always read the instructions as I spent a 'funny half hour' trying to find out where to stick the battery, but eventually, I realised that there's a hatch cover on the front of the mouse, which, on pressing the 'OPEN' (a bit of a hint) button, slides out to reveal a battery carrier.

So now it's ready to roll. To be honest, with Windows XP, there's very little else to do, apart from plug in the USB bit and turn the PC on.

Suddenly, after the 'Windows reckons you've been plugging things in again, haven't you, you naughty boy?' message, it works.

So does the laptop's touch-pad but you don't have to touch it. In some PCs you can disable it, which might make up for the extra current drain of the USB transmitter. This latter course of action is also to your advantage as the annoying thing I've found with it, not being a touch typist, is my habit of trailing my thumbs over it, leading to the pressing of the Enter button on the laptop when I didn't mean to.

It does pay, however to install the Intellipoint software as supplied though. A working mouse is one thing, but being able to alter the speed at which it darts its cursor across the screen is another. Likewise, I'm not convinced you'd get any 'battery low' warnings either if you just rely on the usual Windows USB driver for pointing devices.

From my experience with a full-sized Microsoft wireless mouse, this doesn't happen very often but especially with a laptop, you'll wish you were near a battery shop when it does.

I now know what actually happens just before your battery 'craps-out' on you (sorry, but I believe that's the modern computer terminology). You'll be working in Excel or Access one day, wondering why all your tables are juddering, preventing you from pointing at the correct cell. It's not the effects of five bottles of The Highgate Brewery's Old Ale the night before; it's the battery on its last legs!

In any case, if you don't load the Intellipoint software you don't get access to the mouse's full range of facilities - it's very easy to adopt a 'well, it works, why bother?' attitude but you really are missing out if you do. Which brings me on to…..

FACILITIES

As well as being a typical three-button mouse (I'm not keen of some of the more sophisticated offerings with a plethora of side buttons too - they just seem to get pressed when I don't want them to), there's a 'clickable' scroll wheel.

Depending on what you're actually doing at the time, this can be used to 'seize' a screen, leaving a pair of arrow heads in the cursor's last known position. Then, just by dragging the mouse slight north or south of the mark, you can scroll constantly up and down your page on view.

On web pages, this facility is extended to moving from side to side on pages that aren't all in view, merely by putting the appropriate side pressure to the wheel.

A new feature on me is the ability to 'magnify' text which is controlled by a well-placed side button. Well, I say 'well-placed' - I haven't pressed it by accident yet.

When pressed, a rectangle or text over which you have placed the cursor grows in stature. You can then move all over the said page, just like using a real magnifying glass. You can zoom the magnification by holding down the button whilst also using the scroll wheel. I think I'll get my Spanish friend, Manuel Dexterity to do that for me though!

This feature only works AFTER you load the Intellipoint software.

PERFORMANCE

Movement is very accurate, thanks to the optical reader that seems to be able to take most 'terrains' in its stride - trouser legs, Virgin Voyager tables covered with blueberry muffin crumbs*, and even the occasional mouse mat. It won't work on clear glass though - nothing to lock onto.

*I'd steer round Lake Costa-Coffee though if I were you.

It is very smooth in its tracking of the screen, down, I suggest to its 1000 dots-per-inch resolution, which will please those that have to draw freehand with their rodent.

It's dinky, but not so much that you feel it's difficult to grip. They've sensibly stuck to a useful minimum of extra buttons for those with hands like York Hams.

WHY IS IT SPECIFIC TO LAPTOPS?

Well, it isn't, rather that full-sized wireless mice de-select themselves from the job for a couple of reasons. Firstly they are larger (no, really?) and secondly, they are movement-sensitive even when the PC's not running, so putting one into a satchel along with the laptop would be inviting it to use up its batteries for no reason as you run down as escalator.

Cleverly, the action of slotting the transmitter into the base of this mouse leads to its being disconnected from its batteries, so you see, it really designed for portability, and not just because it's small.

AND FINALLY….

I can't yet comment on battery life, but my full-sized Microsoft offering seems to take 6 months to a year before it dies on me. I really can't see the need for a rechargeable version with 4 AA batteries costing £1 in Poundland.

All in all, not a bad 18 quid's worth.

 

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