Of Mice and Men

No I’m not talking about John Steinbeck’s novella that my secondary school teacher made us read, but I’m talking about the quest for the mouse. I guess it all stared back in the days of my youth when I started playing Counter-Strike during my A-levels year. Being a student with little money I opted for an A4Tech USB laptop ball mouse for a cost of about $19. Optical mice didn’t really cut it back then and/or were too expensive for me. I remember the days of taking the ball out and cleaning the mouse. Oh how simple life was back then. I did hear of Razer back then when a friend of mine told me about his Razer Boomslang that he got overseas for $150+ I believe. $150+ AND overseas: that was just too far out there. And as my gaming progressed and I moved to NUS I thought of just playing a few games now and then with bots. But to my surprised I found people joining in my games and it was then I decided that I had to get a proper mouse. I went from Sim Lim Square to Funan DigitalLife Mall to SuntecCity and finally settled on a Logitech MX310 for $59 from TheSoftwareBoutique in Funan.
MX310 specifications:

• 800 DPI
• 5 buttons + scroll wheel (2 extra buttons: 1 on each side of the mouse where thumb and pinkie)
• USB interface
• Symmetric – thus can be used by both lefties and righties

I was happy with the mouse but little did I know that in my final year I would get see quite a bit of the Razer Diamondback in my future.
Diamondback specifications:

• 1600 DPI
• 7 buttons + scroll wheel (4 extra buttons: 2 on each side)
• USB interface
• Symmetric – thus can be used by both lefties and righties
• Lower vertical profile compared to the MX310
• Much lighter compared to the MX310

I got the original Diamondback as a birthday present from the guys. Thanks again guys! =D (I’m pretty sure it was more of Zhenyang’s idea though) It came bundled with the Razer eXactMat so it was a nice deal. While playing in a Counter-Strike Source competition ended up winning a Diamondback Plasma edition (nice blue glow with an invisible laser compared to the red glow of the visible LED). Winning was mostly due to our great leader Ultima of Xtreame ChaotiX. The Diamondbacks are nice and light but the 1600 DPI takes quite a bit of getting used to and with retail prices of over $60 they were not the kind of mice you would want to get for every desktop / laptop you use. And this leads me back to the quest for the mouse: a an affordable mouse with decent specifications that can be used by even gamers. And as I was strollilng Hua Ho Yayasan I found it.

Enter the Logitech Optical Mouse USB



Not an eye catching name at all; heck it was pretty hard for me to find the exact name, I thought it was just a description of the product not the actual name!

• 1000 DPI
• Scroll with a tilt wheel (i.e. left and right tilts)
• USB interface
• Symmetric – thus can be used by both lefties and righties
• Lighter than the diamond back with similar height profiles

The tilt wheel can be rocked left / right and these 2 buttons can be customized from zooming to scrolling to simulating a keypress (or even a combination of keypresses). Tested it with Battlefield 1942 and the performance of the mouse was flawless: perfect tracking without any skipping or the ‘why-am-I-facing-the-ground/sky’ problem when you move the mouse too quickly and the hardware just can’t keep up with it. And to top it all off the mouse cost $16.90. $16.90!! Yeah it’s more than those el-cheapo $10 mice but add the extra $6.90 and you will not regret getting this mouse: unless of course you need a small compact mice (or any other reason that this mouse won’t find your requirements) but for everything else I would recommend this mouse for everybody. Period.

The Logitech Optical Mouse USB: Functionality, simplicity all at a great cost (but not a great name)
— TheWheat

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