Great for general computer use.

I own a Dell laptop with a Synpatics touchpad and trackpoint device. I was tired of the mouse pointer bouncing around all over the place whenever I typed -- this was either because of the touchpad or the trackpoint device being too sensitive to vibrations, so I disabled both (through the Synpatics Touchpad driver program).

I bought a Microsoft optical mouse from a small, independent computer store in Monrovia, California last July (2003). I asked the guy how much and he told me $6. I was surprised. I wasn't sure if the mouse was the 'real thing' or if I was buying a dud. But, I bought it anyway.

For my purposes (a lot of general use things, such as word processing, spreadsheet, Powerpoint, Internet, etc.), this mouse has worked great.


All that I had to do when I got the mouse was plug it into my computer's USB port or PS/2 port. My laptop automatically recognized the device. One shortcoming of NOT installing a Microsoft mouse driver for this mouse is that whenever I select text spanning a few pages in Microsoft Word, the mouse pointer will scroll way too quickly and I will have many pages of text highlighted (rather than the page and a half I wanted).

To remedy this 'fast scroll' problem, I downloaded from Microsoft the driver for my Microsoft Optical Wheel Mouse. It remedied the problem, but it also conflicted with my already installed Synaptics touchpad driver (which I had to uninstall). I was aware of the conflict because, whenever I would shut down my computer, a pop-up window would state that the computer failed to shutdown a DLL which related to the Microsoft Mouse driver. Well, I ended up uninstalling the Microsoft Mouse driver as well.


Ergonomically, I find the mouse very comfortable to operate. While this mouse is optical, so it's without a mouse ball, and so it doesn't necessarily need a mouse pad, I have found that movement is a lot more fluid with a mousepad supporting the mouse. (I bought a cheap one for $3 from Office Depot.)


This mouse comes with a USB plug, but on the end of it is a PS/2 adapter which you can snap on or off. I usually plug my mouse into my external IBM Tracking IV keyboard which has a PS/2 port on it for an external mouse device (in case you don't want to use the Trackpoint device on the keyboard). But, when I'm traveling, I don't take the external keyboard with me and I simply plug my mouse into the PS/2 port in the back of my laptop.