A mouse is a puck you move around on a flat surface called a mouse pad. A pointer correspondingly moves on the
screen. You use it to point at buttons or options on the screen. A mouse has two (Microsoft) or three buttons
(Logitech) you can press to initiate some action. Before you buy a mouse, try it out for at 10 minutes or more. Mice are often designed to be comfortable only for left or right-handed
people. Also consider the alternative, a track ball which needs less free desk space.
Mice frequently stop working. There is no need to buy a new one. All you need to do is clean them. I will tell
you how later in this entry.
Your alternatives are a trackball or a touchpad, often
embedded in the keypad.
Double Clicking
Windows requires you often to double click, i.e. click the left mouse button twice, at exactly the right
cadence. It can leave you babbling and drooling trying to get the interval just right. If you click too fast your
double click gets treated as a single click. If too slow, it gets treated as two single clicks. With a 3-button
mouse, you just press the middle mouse button to simulate a perfect double click. Generally, the older you are,
the more trouble you will have with double clicks. You can go into the Control Panel ⇒
Mouse and slow down the double click rate. Alternatively right click the
desktop ⇒ Personalise ⇒ change mouse
pointers. Click apply after each change to make it stick.
Mouse Connections
There are five kinds of ways to attach a mouse to the computer:
USB (Universal Serial Bus) :
has a small rectangular connector. Does not require an adaptor card. It fits into a
USB
port. This is the way to go with a modern computer that has USB
ports. This would be your
first choice.PS/2:
has a small round connector. Does not require an adaptor card, but does require a motherboard with a PS/2
mouse connector.Serial mouse:
usually attaches to com1: connector. You may need an adapter if the mouse and port
don’t have the same number of pins. Mice usually have 9 pins and
COM (Component Object Model)
ports either 9 or 25. Serial mice are not quite
as responsive as the other two.Bus mouse:
requires an adapter card installed in a slot. It is often difficult to find a free IRQ (Interrupt Request)
for this style of mouse. These are the most responsive type. They are getting
harder to find.Cordless mouse:
No cord. Communicates via radio waves. Box connects via PS/2 or USB
port. The batteries needed
inside the mouse to handle the radio reception last only about 6 weeks if you
don’t take special precautions to turn off the mouse when not in use. If you assume a 3-year life for
the mouse, you will need 26 battery changes, which adds about adds about
to the cost of the mouse. Look into using rechargeables, or a rechargeable mouse. Mouse manufacturers could
probably extend battery life by putting an unused mouse into hibernation from which movement wakes it.
Mouse Types
Mice can be classified five ways.
Laser mice:
Latest and greatest. These don’t have a rolling ball. The laser gives finer precision than
LED (Light-Emitting Diode) optical. Oddly you can’t see the laser
light.Optical mice:
These don’t have a rolling ball. They don’t need as frequent cleaning and they have no moving
parts to wear out. They work by tracking the movement of patterns in the surface they are resting on. They
need an interesting variegated surface to work well, not a smooth solid colour. Your pant leg will
do. A mouse pad with a fine grid will work best. You want a slippery surface so you can make fine movements
easily. No point in wearing the paint off your desk for want of a
mouse pad.Air mice:
I have not used one of these. I have just seen one in a retail shop in a sealed box that the retailer would
not let me open. Apparently you don’t need a surface. You can wave the mouse around in the air and it
will still work. It has a miniature gyroscope in it for air use and an optical sensor for desk use. You use
the air mode for gaming or for presentations where you can stand 9.14 metres (30 ft)
feet from the computer. I don’t know what sort of precision they are capable of. Manufacturers are too
embarrassed to tell, so it is probably fairly bad. They are wireless. Models include the Gyration Air mice or Logitech Air Mouse.Ergonomic:
Check out the Perfit. In comes is 5 different sizes for precise hand fit.Wheel:
These have a wheel you spin to scroll without using the those infernal scroll bars. Once you get used to one,
you will never go back. My own mouse has two fast scroll buttons in addition.Mechanical:
These use a rolling rubber ball which internally rubs against rollers to spin them. Then the rotations are
measured by a toothed wheel blocking a beam of light. These are now obsolete. You can’t even buy them
any more.High Resolution
These are sold primarily as gaming mice, but they really help with fine control, particularly in Paint Shop
Pro or similar paint program. I would never go back. Low res is 400 dpi;
medium res is 600 dpi; high res is 1000 dpi;
1500- 2000 dpi is gamer.
Logitech
Logitech and Microsoft are the main manufacturers of good quality mice. A cheap
mouse is a royal PITA.
My previous mouse was a Logitech LX-8 cordless. It had a high resolution which made for much smoother
scrolling — very much worth the extra cost. It has 5 buttons. The left and
right button have the usual meanings. The wheel also acts as a middle mouse button. Clicking it brings up a 2D
scrolling mode similar to the hand mode of the Mac. The wheel wags side to side for horizontal scrolling. My
complaint with it is it is hard to clean. It has crevices that dead skin cells accumulate in. Even worse, it does
not slide freely. I frequently clean the feet and the mousepad, which seems to help a bit. The feet don’t
seem to be excessively worn. It is as though the feet are sticky. Further, the wells for the feet are not deep
enough, and the feet keep sliding out of them. I am in the process of looking for some new feet.
Beware, there as a website called Logictech.com that you might mistake for
the Logitech website. It tries to give you that illusion by featuring Logitech mouse drivers.
My current mouse is an M310 cordless. See my notes below.
Mouse Cleaning
Since you constantly touch mousepads, mice and keyboards, they tend to get dirty. It helps if you select a mouse that
is easy to clean. Try to avoid crevices where sweat-glued dead skin cells can accumulate. Mice wear out faster
than any other part of a computer. Depending on how hard you are on them, you may need a new one every one to
three years. Often when they misbehave it is just that they are dirty or have worn out feet. Here is how to clean
them.
A little bottle of hand sanitiser on your desk to clean your hands frequently can stop the mouse from getting
sticky in the first place.
Cleaning A Mechanical Ball Mouse
Twist off the bottom plate to release the ball. Clean the ball in pure isopropanol (aka rubbing alcohol) which you can get at the drugstore. You want the
99% pure kind without any added oils.
Use an alcohol-soaked Q-tip to clean around inside. You will usually find lint wrapped around the two rollers.
Pick away at it with the swab or a wooden toothpick. If you use tweezers be very careful not to scratch the
rollers.
Clean the rest of the mouse with a Kleenex and alcohol. If the mouse has grooves, pick the crud out with a
wooden toothpick and alcohol swab.
Cleaning An Optical Mouse
Clean the mouse generally with pure isopropanol which you can get
at the drugstore. You want the 99% pure kind without any added oils.
Use an alcohol-soaked Q-tip to clean around inside where the light comes out. Often there will be some hairs
or lint stuck inside confusing the mouse by reflecting the bright light. Pick it out gently with tweezers being
very careful not to scratch the lenses inside.
Clean the rest of the mouse with a Kleenex and alcohol. If the mouse has grooves, pick the crud out with a
wooden toothpick and alcohol-soaked swab. I also found a rubber dental probe useful for getting in the cracks.
Avoid metal tools since the plastic is quite soft and will scratch easily. The feet are held on only with cheap
adhesive. Be gentle with them.
Unfortunately, modern mice are designed with cracks for dirt to get in, but no way to open them up to service
and clean them. The left and right click buttons seem to deteriorate, perhaps mechanically, perhaps from dirty
electrical contacts or perhaps from dust blocking optical sensors. I can try cleaning them with a blast of
compressed air, a poor substitute for being able to disassemble and clean. I treat mice as consumables.
Inside the mouse are tiny switches that the buttons depress when you click them. Make sure there is no dust or
debris stuck in the switches, or you will have trouble selecting text (selections will disappear unexpectedly).
You might use a small amount of silicone oil to lubricate each switch, removing any excess with a Q-tip.
You also have to clean your mouse pad and the bottom of
your mouse every few days for optimum smoothness.
Miscellaneous Mouse Tips
- The feet of a mouse are extremely important in
how smoothly the mouse performs. You need to replace them ever 8 months or so
because they wear and lose their slipperiness. Check before you buy a mouse that replacement feet are
available.
- Go into the Control Panel ⇒ mouse to speed up the mouse movement and to
give it acceleration to let you have find control when moving it slowly and ability to move it rapidly over
large distances.
- Go into the Control Panel ⇒ mouse to optionally turn on mouse trails, hide
cursor while typing, display cursor position when you hit ctrl etc. Experiment until
you get things the way you like.
- Go into the Control Panel ⇒ mouse to select a better mouse cursor. The
default one is tiny and hard to see especially on a large screen. On Vista I used the one called variations. It is animated so it is easier to pick out on a large screen. Another good choice is
bronze since the bronze colour shows up well on your typical black and white
composition page. Unfortunately, these are not available on Windows 7. You can scan the net for free alternate
cursors. They come in sets of about 70 little *.ani and
*.cur files. Beware of themes that require installing any additional software or
toolbars. The cursors should install by simply right clicking an *.inf file included,
and selecting install. You can then select which theme to use with the control
panel.
- The main problem with a mouse is you have to take your right hand off the keyboard to use it. A foot switch or auxiliary keypad can partly compensate for this.
- Synergy lets you share a single
mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems without special
hardware. It’s intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own
display.
Real World Mice
These mice are in ascending order of cost:
 | recommend Amazon⇒Rhino Washable Mouse |
| asin: B003SEUFUA |
| Wireless. You can put it is a dishwasher to clean it. |
|
| Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock |
 | recommend Amazon⇒Logitech V220 Cordless Optical |
| asin: B0028K2TUY |
| Logitech V220 cordless optical mouse is a small, basic, inexpensive mouse designed for notebooks that comes in 8 colours/patterns. 1000 dpi. |
|
| Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock |
 | recommend Amazon⇒Logitech Wireless Mouse M310 |
| asin: B003I4FHNA |
DPI and reports per second are not published. Full size, battery powered cordless mouse. This is what I use myself. It uses infrared laser outside the visible spectrum. You can’t tell just by looking that it is operating. Comfortable rubbery side grips. 3 Buttons. 3 year warranty, but consider that you will still need to buy a new mouse while you wait for shipping to Logitech and back plus repair time. It is part of the fantasy collection that comes in five patterns/colours. It has a fast easy to control vertical scroll, though I would prefer an accelerating vertical scroll. My finger gets tired vertically scrolling. The movement is unusually smooth. It works with standard Windows HID drivers or you can download the Logitech Setpoint drivers. The biggest drawback is the feet are not slippery enough. If I roll it directly over my wood-grain desktop, it works, but the mouse moves slowly. It seems to like a light-coloured surface. Even a piece of plain white paper with no pattern works fine. With a dark background the mouse becomes sluggish. The mouse thinks it is not moving as fast as it actually is. I have two hypotheses why this might be so: - the mouse uses more power on a dark background since less light reflects back. If batteries are failing, it can’t generate enough light and the mouse will become sluggish.
- dark backgrounds reflect less light, and looks more uniform to the mouse, so the mouse misses more changes in what it sees as it whips by.
New batteries will usually fix a sluggish mouse, even if the control panel indicator says the old ones are fine. The other problem with it is it is too easy to hit the right mouse button when dragging. I don’t know why this is. Despite these flaws I liked it so much I got one for my room mate. |
|
| Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock |
 | recommend Amazon⇒Microsoft wireless mobile 4000 |
| asin: B002DPUUL4 |
| DPI and reports per second are not published. Full size, battery powered cordless mouse. This is what I used myself, the lime green model. It comes in black, pink, teal and green. I don’t recommend it. 3 Buttons. It did not work on a black mouse pad even though they advertised advanced BlueTrack technology that would run anywhere. I had to use it on the wood grain desk top. The mouse wheel does not click as it moves. It is advertised to have both laser and LED. I see no sign of anything but a blue LED. It is quite a bit jerkier than the old Logitech. The transceiver is tiny. It plugs into any free USB port. I found trying different ports would improve jerkiness. I found it worked best plugged into a USB extender cord (left over from the old Logitech mouse) so that the receiver sits about 20 cm (7.87 in) from the mouse. There is a traveling storage slot for the transceiver housed in the mouse, which might be confusing to someone who does not understand the physics. It does not have feet, rather two large semicircular arcs. I trust that will provide extra wear. It advertises extremely long battery life, but I get only 3 weeks, much worse than my previous Logitech. The mouse has a Mickey Mouse exposed spring near the light sensor. I don’t know what its function is other than to interfere with cleaning. It died after a few months with the cursor too jerky to use and the mousewheel frozen. This a dog! |
|
| Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock |
 | recommend Amazon⇒Logitech LX8 Laser Cordless Mouse |
| asin: B000ZH7E5M |
| Logitech has stopped publishing specifications. 5 buttons. Relatively inexpensive, sensible mouse for non-gaming. This is what I used myself. Not recommended. |
|
| Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock |
 | recommend Amazon⇒Logitech MX518 Gaming Optical Mouse — Metal |
| asin: B0007Z1M50 |
| 1600 dpi. Gaming mouse. I used a model similar to this, the MX500. The feet tend to come off easily. It is difficult to clean. It has a solid feel. |
|
| Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock |
 | recommend Amazon⇒Logitech Anywhere Mouse MX |
| asin: B002HWRJBC |
| 1500 dpi. 125 reports per second. Rechargeable cordless mouse. Dark field laser for use on wide variety of surfaces including glass. Encrypted transmissions to deter spying. Hyperfast scrolling. This is an office mouse, not a gaming mouse. this is a smaller version of Performance Mouse MXs for portable computers. |
|
| Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock |
 | recommend Amazon⇒Logitech Wireless Mouse M325 |
| asin: B00550FWUI |
| DPI and reports per second are not published. Compact size, battery powered cordless mouse. This is what we use on the laptop. It uses infrared outside the visible spectrum. You can’t tell just by looking that it is operating. Comfortable rubbery side grips. 3 Buttons. 3 year warranty, but consider that you will still need to buy a new mouse while you wait for shipping to Logitech and back plus repair time. The one we have is white with a flower pattern. It comes in other patterns. It has a fast easy to control vertical scroll. The movement is spins freely without clicks. If offers almost no resistance to spinning. Works with standard Windows HID drivers or you can download the Logitech Setpoint drivers. The biggest drawback is the feet are not slippery enough. It has finer optical tracking and scrolling precision than the M305 and M310 models. It claims a battery lasts 18 months. I bought it at Future Shop for $30 CAD. |
|
| Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock |
 | recommend Amazon⇒Evoluent Vertical Mouse 3 |
| asin: B000O3OEGE |
| Evoluent VM3R2-RSB Vertical Mouse 3 is an ergonomic mouse where you grasp it on the side instead of the top. Diagrams show why this might be easier on your wrist. |
|
| Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock |
 | recommend Amazon⇒Logitech G9 Laser Mouse |
| asin: B000UHE8Y2 |
| 3200 dpi. 1000 reports per second. Premium gaming mouse. Variable tuning weights. |
|
| Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock |
 | recommend Amazon⇒Logitech Performance Mouse MX |
| asin: B002HWRJBM |
| 1500 dpi. 125 reports per second. Rechargeable cordless mouse. Dark field laser for use on wide variety of surfaces including glass. Encrypted transmissions to deter spying. Hyperfast scrolling. This is an office mouse, not a gaming mouse. |
|
| Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock |
 | recommend Amazon⇒Logitech G5 Laser Mouse |
| asin: B000ODN7VM |
| 2000 dpi. 1000 reports per second. Premium gaming mouse. Variable tuning weights. |
|
| Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock |
 | recommend Amazon⇒Logitech G7 Laser Cordless Mouse |
| asin: B000AY5Y5W |
| 2000 dpi. 500 reports per second. Gaming mouse. Cordless radio link. |
|
| Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock |
LeigiMouse
One of the big problems with mice is you must keep taking your hand off the keyboard way to the right to use
the mouse than back again. Alternating between mouse and keyboard wastes considerable time. A Chinese company has
proposed a solution, the LeigiMouse. I have never used one,
so I can’t vouch for its practicality. I am just glad somebody recognises the problem. You hold the mouse
in your right hand as you type! The mouse look as little too large for this to be convenient,
but it is a start. Perhaps eventually the mouse might be shrunk like a finger cot you wear on your index finger
or sticky reflective dot you wear on your finger tip and just wave it around in the air. The electronics need not
be in the part attached to your hand.
Future Mice
Here are some ideas for future mice:
- Make it possible to open the mouse up to clean it out.
- Use optical sensors for the all the buttons instead of mechanical switches so they will always closes
cleanly and reliably.
- Models of mouse with different degrees of default sensitivity, including amount of pressure needed to click
the buttons.
- Seat the mouse feet in a well perhaps a millimeter deep so they will last for the life of the mice.
- Use the extra buttons on the mouse to invoke copy/paste/delete
- Store the a stack of the last copied clips and let you paste any one of them.
- Let you program some of the extra keys as a common keyed phrase.
- Put any extra buttons on the top, not the side where you can accidentally squeeze them. Alternatively, make
the mouse taller so buttons on the sides won’t be inadvertently squeezed simply is the process of holding
the mouse.
- A tiny accelerometer inside the mouse so that the controller in the mouse can automatically turn off the
laser when the mouse has not moved for a while and turn it back on as soon as the user moves it.
- Design the mouse and controller so that even if the CPU (Central Processing Unit) fails to pay
attention to reports for a second because it is pathologically busy, it does not lose position or clicks.
- A warranty that gives you a new mouse from any dealer selling the mouse. This covers wear on the feet and
worn out click detectors. You have to pay a replacement fee depending on the age of the mouse. The dealer may
optionally repair the mouse, e.g. applying new feet on the spot. You don’t have to wait for shipping to
and from the factory. You won’t be without a mouse for more than a few hours. Alternatively, the dealer
can give you a loaner mouse till yours is fixed. As it is, if you mouse dies, you have to buy a new one even if
you have a warranty.
punctuation 0-9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z (all)
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mouse
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