Don’t think I mentioned it, but I went and got the Microsoft Laser Mouse 6000 (Amazon link) to replaced the Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 6000 (Amazon link) because I finally had enough of it. You can read the reasons why I got annoyed with it in my previous blog entry.
My initial impression is it’s a lot better than the wireless one. There are some major differences between the wired and the wireless version, which was surprising (to me at least). I had imagined the only thing different might be the color and one is wireless. Turns out that the wired version DOES NOT have the tilt wheel. I think in this case, that’s a good thing. Since I’ve become very dependent on the middle click, the middle click on the wireless version was very awful and requried a tremendous amount of force for it to work. It was probably because they didn’t want you to accidentally middle click when you wanted to tilt left/right. I wouldn’t mind if they would’ve allowed me to reprogram what tilting left/right would do, but it’s programmed to scroll horizontally and with a 24″ wide screen LCD @ 1920×1280, I really never have to scroll horizontally anymore, rendering the tilt wheel useless.
Another major difference is that the wired version has 1 button on each side, while the wireless version has 2 buttons on the left side. I don’t really have a preference because I really disliked both placement of the buttons. My favorite mouse of all time is still the Microsoft Intellimouse Optical Mouse. This new wired laser mouse is very close to that, but imagine the side buttons to be really small and clicking it requried actually reaching for it. The side buttons on the Intellimouse Optical were large and my hand thumb and ring finger were naturally on it. I guess this was to prevent users from accidentally clicking on the side buttons, but having to use my thumb to reach the left side button is a bit of a workout.
Final thing I have to say about the mouse is that there’s this logo/sticker/button above the Microsoft logo that gets annoying when you brush against it. The surface of the mouse is smooth, but that logo has a very harsh surface. Nothing too major really, but another thing I would’ve not missed if they excluded it.
After all this, the mouse is quite sensitive and I’m enjoying it a lot.