Logitech MX 1000 Laser Mouse - Hardware Review ---------------------------------------------- Written by Dr. Fibes Wednesday, 12 October 2005 The Mouse King In sales, they train salesmen to get the product in the customer's hands. Nothing sells a car like getting that customer in the driver's seat, "Take her for a drive, you'll love this baby!" They want you to get that steering wheel in your hands, and feel that fine Corinthian leather. A national ice cream store gladly gives out free samples of their product. My mother and I were in a tourist trap area recently, there was a girl with a plate of cheese samples. We tried it, and then my Mom went in and bought about $15 worth of the stuff. Touch. They want you to touch their product. It's a tried and proven sales technique. In the computing world you don't touch much. All that hoopla about motherboards, processors, video processors is fine. If you're like most of Blacklisted411's readers you research and research to make sure you get the finest of these items that you can afford. But months down the road, the only thing you'll be touching on a daily basis is the mouse and the keyboard. Monitors count also; you touch those with your sense of sight. Of course, you'll touch the "n" button on your computer from time to time, but the limited function of that piece of hardware dooms it to never be of any real interest. The days of the "roller ball" mouse are over. It just isn't worth it. You can buy optical mice for a pittance nowadays. Wireless mice are a bit more. No more digging hair and gook out of that stupid ball. But once you go wireless, it's hard to go back. Give me a wireless optical mouse, I'm spoiled. The mouse I am currently using, the Logitech MX 1000, it isn't cheap. Some say you get what you pay for. I say sometimes. I used the Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer for years. It wasn't cheap either. Before that, I had a funky old wireless mouse that worked with IR. The receiver had to "see" the mouse, not easy to do on my cluttered desk. Amazingly it worked fairly well. When I got the Intellimouse I thought "This is it!" I really loved that mouse - at first. Then I got to know it. It eats batteries on a pretty regular basis. But this can be solved with NiCads. Instead of popping for 2 fresh alkaline AA's every month, I opted for switching out NiCads every 3-7 days. That's livable. And the newer versions claim a battery life of 6 months with the alkalines. But some things were not livable. My primary gripe with this mouse is the "lag." It's got a proximity sensor that knows when your hand is upon it, and only then does it become active. There's a appreciable lag from the time that you do this to the time that the mouse becomes operational. But even more aggravating is the fact that you can rest your hand upon it so there's no doubt the proximity sensor is active. Now move that mouse. See? There is an irritating lag between your moving the mouse and the cursor on the screen moving. You learn to live with it, but you never get to like it. And the accuracy is not the greatest. I run a 1600 x 1200 screen, you get to notice things like accuracy on real estate that size. This DOES NOT happen with the MX 1000. I love the MX 1000. Everything that the Intellimouse does wrong, the MX 1000 does right. There is no lag, NONE. The proximity sensor is instant. The cursor moves immediately when you move the mouse. Logitech calls it Fast RF, seems appropriate to me. It has rechargeable batteries built into the mouse. When you're done for the day, you put it back in the cradle/receiver and it's all charged up the next time you start up. Mine has been used in a family situation. Kids and wives are not real reliable about putting things back in their place sometimes. No problem, this mouse easily stays charged for over a week, even without putting it back in the cradle. In fact, Logitech claims it's good for 21 days, and then needs 3-4 hours to go for another 21 days. I believe it, it has battery power aplenty. They also say 10 minutes of charging will pump it full of enough juice to go for a whole day. I have done this, it's true. Like all of the mice in this category you have a number of buttons besides the familiar left and right mouse buttons. But this one has a couple more than most. Some I find very handy, others kind of worthless. But like all of them, every button can be programmed in the control panel to achieve just about any function you desire. So the worthless ones are my fault, I could change them to anything. I'm an information junkie. I don't like taking anybody's word for anything; it's often slanted because of some opinion of theirs. That means I spend a lot of time at the search engines. These upscale mice have the single most important invention since the browser, the BACK button. No longer do you have to move your cursor up to the top left corner of your screen to go back (to the search engine), with just a quick click of that button you're back to where you started. I can't live without it. I can surf at hyper speed with it, without it I spend more time complaining than surfing. It also has the FORWARD button, I almost never use that. Another one I'll have to change. And the "switch application" button. Alt-tab is so ingrained in my consciousness that I dream about it sometimes. And I don't care for the implementation of the switch app button. So someday I'm going to change that one too. (Ed. Note: Writing this article got me going; those are now cut/paste buttons. We'll see...) It has the latest in scroll wheels, many functions there. Hold down the control key and scroll the wheel, the text in your application gets larger and smaller, handy. Tap the wheel and you can auto scroll. Or anything you can imagine. Move it side to side and scroll sideways. And of course, the standard scrolling action, infinitely adjustable to your liking. Located surrounding the scroll wheel are the CRUISE UP and CRUISE DOWN buttons. It took me awhile to start taking advantage of these, but now I realize that they are very handy functions as well. Rather than getting a sore index finger from turning that scroll wheel all day I can use the UP/DOWN buttons to accomplish the same thing much faster. They are essentially the same as your Page Up/Page Down keys. This is especially handy on long pages when you're at the end and wish to go to the top or visa-versa. Oh, I'm big on hotkeys, and I know that control-home/end will accomplish the same thing, but my hand is already on the mouse and it works just about as well, and just about as fast. There is a battery level bar indicator on the side to let you know the state of charge; I never look at it because it's always ready to go. It also has that deep-sculpted fat look, I love that too. Once you place your hand on top of this mouse, you know you have sure control and feel for everything mousey. All of these things are great, but I haven't even gotten to one of the most important benefits of this mouse. That would be the accuracy. This mouse is hands down the fastest, most accurate mouse available. The resolution is amazing. The reason it's the King is that it uses laser technology to illuminate/read surface movement. The gamers all love this mouse too for that very reason. Logitech's web site gives a great demo on the virtues of this mouse. If you''re mouse shopping, do yourself a favor and check it out, you'll see for yourself. http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/products/details/US/EN,CRID=3,CONTENTID=9043 It is 20 times more sensitive to surface detail, such as the phony photograph of wood grain of your computer desk. No mouse pad required. I've yet to find a surface my MX 1000 won't work on directly. I haven't used a mouse pad in years. By now it's probably obvious that I love the MX 1000 and you're probably wondering if you can take any stock in what I have to say on the subject because I appear so biased. I thought long and hard. Here's the only bad thing I can say about it. The editor, Zachary Blackstone and I have had an ongoing discussion about this mouse vs. the Microsoft Intellimouse. Both of us own the Intellimouse AND the MX 1000. He tried his MX 1000 and went back to the Intellimouse. The reason: He said that it tends to wander a bit. And then he goes on to say that every Logitech mouse that he has ever used tends to do that. I must confess, I think he's right. I never cared for Logitech mice before this one, and I do believe I have seen that wandering issue on the few I've used in the past. This mouse also does the wander thing. However, it isn't that striking of a problem to me, and certainly MAGNITUDES less of a problem compared to the Intellimouse LAG, so I'm using it. I notice it mostly in right-click submenus, I have to very much be on the ball or I'll select the wrong item. (Ed. Note: Once again, due to writing this article, I decided to look into this. I found that I had "Pointer Acceleration" set to High; reset it to Medium, now it is perfect.) So there's everything, including the ONLY drawback I can come up with. That touch thing IS important. The tower I'm using right now has no sides on it, it's ugly. I live in the Mojave Desert, everything I can do to keep that puppy cool is very important here, since I refuse to spend $600 - 700/mo. in the summer air conditioning my place. Motherboards especially take a beating. I dedicate a 24" box fan to the computer in the summertime. It works great folks, if you don't care about the looks and the noise. Those supercooler CPU fans got nothin' on me. That CPU isn't the only thing producing heat in there. The motherboard is some old Dell surplus item, purchased in an emergency situation when my last m/b died (from the heat, I get about 2 - 3 years out of them). I do have a decent video card. But my keyboard is a $1 item from a garage sale. But don't get between me & my MX 1000. If I have to head for the hills, I'm grabbing my hard drive and my mouse. Everything else can be kludged together from whatever I can find. I'd like to take my NEC Multisync XP21 21" monitor, but it's too heavy. Mouse & hard drive, that's the essentials for me.