Description: Corded optical mouse
Features: 5 buttons, rolling wheel, no mouse ball
Connectors: USB (PS/2 adapter included)
Price: About $100 AUD
Availability: Everywhere
Manufacturer: Microsoft (in case you forgot the URL :) )
Manufacturer's website for this product: here
Manufacturer's extra info: IntelliEye Technology

A few years ago I spent $85 on a 3 button Logitech mouse, the state-of-the-art at the time. I showed it to my dad and told him the price and he said "What are you spending that much money on a mouse for? A mouse is a throw-away item. You don't pay more than $20 for one. The one I have cost $5". After a debate about how his mouse didn't come with a 3 year warranty or was anywhere near precise or smooth as mine, I still left feeling a tad guilty about my big outlay for a relatively featureless mouse. I learned my lesson.

Never tell the old man about expensive computer purchases :)

That 3 button mouse lasted me about two years (and was still being used on my Linux box until yesterday) until about November last year when I got myself a cordless Logitech mouse, the symmetrical type with 3 buttons and a wheel. It was a warranty replacement for a dysfunctional older cordless model with no wheel, because the wheel-less model was no longer available. This was fine by me, even though I had to pay the $20 difference in price, because the one without a wheel kept falling off the table due to a dodgy "ergonomic" humped design that made it nearly impossible to pick up. I use the term "ergonomic" loosely - it was very much a strain to use for any length of time, due to the difficulty to pick up whenever you needed to relocate it on the desk. Whenever it got close to the edge of the desk, it would quite often slip out of my grasp and fall off. I think that may have been what broke it in the long run :)

A year later and after one more mouse exchange due to detatching teflon pads I saw a mouse which really caught my attention - the Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer.

I saw this mouse at a LAN party and decided that I must have one. Taking a break from the party I headed off to Electronics Boutique in Bankstown and forked out the fantastic plastic to the tune of $99.95. Much better value for money than my old 3 button Logitech, and even better value (in my opinion) than the aforementioned Logitech cordless wheel mouse, which also now retails for about $99.95 (it was $119.95 when I got mine). Until the weekend I was a Logitech devotee, and was going to upgrade the 3 button mouse on the Linux box to a cheap Logitech wheel mouse when I got the chance. Instead I have relegated the cordless mouse to the Linux box and shoved the old one in a drawer.

The Intellimouse Explorer is silver in colour with a transparent base, a somewhat radical change from the typical conservative off-white colour scheme. It has a USB connector with a PS2 adapter (which I use). It has 5 buttons, the usual left and right, two thumb and one under the wheel. The wheel is very slick, much more slick than wheels I've felt on other Logitech or Microsoft wheel mice. Both companies probably have new models of mice with better wheels by now, but this is the newest model of mouse I've used. The main drawcard about this mouse though is the optical sensor device. No moving parts means less maintenance, and hopefully longer life. But that's not all.

This mouse will work on surfaces your old mouse would have a fit on.

Sorry, I just felt that the above sentence needed a whole paragraph to itself. This mouse will move silky smooth on just about anything with a non-reflective opaque surface. Here is a small list of things that I've tried it on, with which it worked perfectly. Table (with or without table cloth), black tshirt, bed quilt, CD (reflective surface UP, I don't know how that works), curved fuzzy-fabricked arm of an arm chair, my leg. It does not work very well at all on anything which produces light, such as my monitor. Some things which it still worked on but had slightly more difficulty with are - my head, a transluscent antistatic bag, some bubble wrap. It's hard to say whether it was the transparency of the latter two items (no, my head is not transparent) that caused difficulty or the fact that it was hard to hold them flat without putting something solid and opaque such as the table underneath them. In such cases it went back into "perfect" mode, probably because it would have had the extra surface underneath to reflect off. I think the main problems it had with all these 3 surfaces is that none of them are flat, it does need a fairly even surface to work properly, even if that surface is curved and fuzzy. But I can't complain about that, a regular mouse needs a flat, non-fuzzy, horizontal surface to work. Which reminds me, this mouse obviously doesn't need to be on a horizontal surface, it can be used on any angle, even upside down. The back of the box says it may have problems also tracking over highly repetitive patterns, such as some printed photographs from magazines or newspapers. I've not seen such a pattern though so I can't test this. You'd be pretty silly to be using a repetitive newspaper or a magazine photograph for your mouse mat anyway. If you really need to use something like that, turn the page over to a written article :)