My current mouse is a Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer for Bluetooth. It is incredibly comfortable, offers 5 “clickable” buttons (including the scroll wheel), and works over Bluetooth so that I don’t have to have a dongle sticking out of my PowerBook G4. It has stellar battery life… lasts weeks with hardcore use.
So, now the problem. The scroll wheel is almost useless now. It slowly started getting gummed up, and hard to scroll. “No problem,” I thought, “I’ll just open it up and clean it.” That was an adventure. The mouse is held together by a single screw at the top of the battery compartment. It appeared to be a torx screw (you know, that crazy six-pronged star thing), but for the life of me, I couldn’t get my torx drivers to turn the thing. After about 30 minutes of wrangling, I finally noticed a microscopic defect in the screw. There was a little metal burr in one of the star’s recesses. I managed to chisel the bur out with the smallest flathead screwdriver in a precision screwdriver set, and finally the screw came off. About 15 minutes later I had the thing disassembled (I had to use the small screwdriver as a lever to pry the scroll wheel out, and it took so much pressure the screwdriver was bending… I was afraid the plastic would break!) I cleaned out the hair and dust and grime, and oiled the wheel up. I reassembled it, and just barely got the torx screw back in (I think my burr removal caused me to lose some traction on the screw head). It worked great… for about 48 hours. Now it’s back to painfully slow scrolling.
The problem is that the scroll wheel is made of a soft rubber material. It deforms, and catches, creating friction. I need something better.
So… did someone want to buy me a Logitech MX Revolution mouse for Christmas? It has a metal alloy scroll wheel. Normally, a slow spin gives you the tried-and-true ratcheted scrolling mechanism. But if you give it a fast flick, a motor retracts the ratcheting mechanism and allows the wheel to free spin for up to seven seconds! Hot. It doesn’t run on Bluetooth, which means I’m going to have a dongle, but I’ll likely just plug that into my monitor, which functions as a USB hub. I don’t really bring a mouse for portable computing, the PowerBook’s track pad is adequate.
Look how sexy.