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Move over, trackpad. A real man uses a mouse.
 technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

T e c h n o f i l e
Laptop delights: 2 travel-size mice from Microsoft


April 2, 2006


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2006, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2006, The Post-Standard

   When I packed for a cruise to the Caribbean a few months ago, I loaded my laptop bag with my digital camera, my iBook, a couple of power supplies and the sexiest snap-apart object this side of Janet Jackson -- a new wireless laptop mouse from Microsoft.
   I hate trackpads. Maybe I'm just a macho misfit, but I feel wimpy every time I have to slide my thumb across a plastic pad just top get my pointer to move. A real man uses a mouse.
   So I always brought along an old mouse when I packed my laptop. But the week before our cruise, Microsoft sent me two of its newest laptop mice, a cute blue-and-gray model with a "tail" and a svelte silver mouse with no visible means of connecting to my laptop. It had no wire and no base station -- no plug at all, as far as I could tell.
   I checked the packaging of the silver mouse -- officially, the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Laser Mouse 6000, which lists for $65 -- to see if something was missing. According to the box, the parts were all there. So I left the wired mouse at home, slipped the no-base-station wireless model into my laptop carrying bag and headed off with my wife and our two best friends for a week at sea.
   If you're a geek like me, you probably think you know already why that new wireless mouse didn't have a base station. It would have to be a Bluetooth mouse, right? Bluetooth, for all the normal folks out there, is a wireless method that uses a short-range transceiver (transmitter-receiver) in your computer so you can use mice, headsets and other devices without wires at short range. My Apple iBook has Bluetooth built in, and many of my friends have Bluetooth in their cell phones, too.
   But that would be the wrong answer, as I found out as soon as I opened my laptop in an airport waiting room and tried to use the mouse. It was horribly off-kilter when I tried to roll it along the top of a dining-room tray. Something was bulging out of the bottom of the mouse.
   It was the base station -- a snap-on, snap-off object so small that I could hide it behind my thumb. The design was so clever and yet so simple that I felt like a dim-bulb for not sensing it sooner. The base station, no bigger than a stick of chewing gum, snapped into the base of the mouse for storage. You simply snap it off and plug it into a USB port to turn it into a wireless mouse base station.
   After I solved the mystery of how it connected to my laptop, this new wireless mouse and I became fast friends. To me, the best part of the Wireless Notebook Laser Mouse 6000 is its utterly smooth feel, both in the way the mouse itself glides across any kind of mouse pad (it's not finicky, but it does work better with a pad) and in the slick rolling of the mouse wheel. My desktop mouse is a larger Microsoft wireless model with the same fluid wheel action, and I was happy to find the same luxury feel in the laptop mouse.
   The wheel also scrolls sideways -- not much help in normal use, I'd suppose, but quite handy when viewing big Excel spreadsheets -- and needs no more than a zephyr's touch to set it in motion. My previous laptop mouse, a Logitech model, required so much force just to budge the wheel that I was never able to scroll smoothly.
   As I mentioned earlier, Microsoft had sent a second mouse, too. It's the Notebook Optical Mouse 3000, which lists for $35. It's a little small for my hands (right or left -- it feels "correct" either way) and isn't wireless. But it's the cutest little mouse I've ever seen, with a retro-Trekkie blue glow coming from the afterburner -- sorry, I mean the back of the mouse -- and a smooth glide just like its wireless mate.
   Both mice have an extra button near a right-hander's thumb. It can be programmed for any of dozens of functions. I set it up to go up one level in a folder hierarchy or back one page on a Web site. You can customize the standard buttons, too, in combinations with modifier keys such as Shift and Ctrl, so that you can quickly open certain programs. Both models come with software for Microsoft's Windows and Apple's Macintosh OS X computers.