Microsoft Notebook Optical Mouse 4000 - mouse > Reviews (5)

Microsoft Wireless Notebook Optical Mouse 4000

Don't you just hate it when you play a race game on your computer and the wire of your mouse makes you lose the game? Yes, I bought my new wireless mouse for this trivial reason. I found it on Amazon for £14.64 and although I could have bought it for less from a different shop or website, I bought from Amazon for the obvious reason of having some Amazon vouchers that I wanted to get rid of. And, considering the fact that I bought my last mouse for £4.00 more than a year and a half ago and it's still in a perfect working order, I probably shouldn't have bought this one. Consumerism is bad!

I bought this mouse with a couple of other stuff that I didn't need much, and they all had the same fitting plastic cover. Why do they make these kinds of stupid packaging? The packaging of this one in particular was so thick that I cut my fingers when I was struggling to open it with a Swiss knife. Why don't they just put them in a darned cardboard box instead? Anyway, when you receive your new mouse, all you have to do is to take the USB receiver from its special place in the bottom of the mouse and plug it in. Then, press the small button in the bottom of the mouse and insert the Energizer battery which is provided with your mouse. After you do that, you can simply install your mouse, and this takes several minutes at the end of which your mouse is ready to go.

The mouse itself looks elegant and cool at the same time (how do they do that?) probably this was the first thing that attracted me to it; the other reason was all the stars it got from the consumers on Amazon. For me, it is pretty comfortable, or at least as comfortable as any 10cm long mouse can be when you have long fingers and yet insist on using your laptop all day, like me.

It has three buttons; in addition to the left and right one, there is a small button that you can press with your thumb very easily, if you are right handed. You can choose the function that you want the buttons to have, but the one on the side is called the magnify button for a reason. It helps you magnify a certain section of your screen, and this function can help those who have weak eyesight, because they can control not only the space they want to magnify, but also the degree to which they want the items to be magnified. The scroll is one of the things I loved about this mouse; it works very smoothly.

The cursor movement is very accurate, even in high speed. The mouse is supposed to be designed to be comfortable in either hand and, trying it a bit with my left hand, I would definitely agree with that. It is wide, and its rubber-sided grip makes it much more comfortable than my older mouse, so although I didn't actually need to buy it, it is worth every penny.

The problem with this mouse is that sometimes it just stops working, and this happened several times since I bought the mouse. To fix this, all I had to do is to unplug the USB receiver, then plug it in again and everything becomes alright again.

At times, you get a message saying that the signal is weak. I got this message few times even though the mouse was working perfectly, so I just ignored it.

The battery life is supposed to be six months, and I am yet to make sure of this, but I do believe it will keep working for a long time, because the battery level, which you can check whenever you want, is still good.

>
** Computer/Operating System:
Windows Vista®, Windows® XP, or Windows 2000 SP4 or higher
** Hard Drive:
45 MB free (Install 100 MB)
** Other:
CD-ROM drive
USB port

Summary: A very good mouse.