optical mice

For almost 25 years now the relatively tiny Kensington company, headquartered amongst the Big Boys in Silicon Valley, has been making the best trackballs --- input devices where the base of the device stays put and you move a ball with your finger/thumb to move the cursor around --- in the business.
But compared to behemoths like the big Swiss outfit Logitech and the galaxy-gobbling entity known as Microsoft, Kensington's had a hard time letting folks know its mice, wired and wireless, are as good as any being made these days.
Well, folks, let this 25-year veteran power-user of computer peripherals make it real plain and simple: Kensington's current crop of mice are as good --- AND as reasonably priced --- as any you're likely to find.
I bought this Pilotmouse Optical Pro to replace my much-loved Logitech MX500 (which had cost me nearly double in 2002 what the Kensington did in March of this year), primarily because its shape was so simliar to the MX500's that I knew it would be a comfy fit for my XXL mitts.
Well, friends, not only is the Kensington as comfy as the MX500, it equaled or surpassed the (admittedly superb) Logitech product in speed, accuracy, flexibility AND looks. This mouse can keep up with the MX500 in every game scenario you can think of --- Counterstrike, Call of Duty, Age of Empires, the Sims, I mean EVERY game scenario. And what's more, after epic all-night MMORPG sessions, my hand and wrist felt fresh as daisies.
I've read the other reviews here, and frankly I don't know what caused the negative experiences with this fine mouse that they encountered. All I have to say about that is this: For under $30 you will NEVER find a better-performing mouse than this one. Period.
Buy one, right now!

I bought this mouse just a week ago, but I couldn't stand it, I took it back and got another mouse. I will never be buying a Kensington mouse again.

To start things off, the scroll button is extremely awkwardly placed, and when you try and use it it's difficult to rotate. After an hour of use my middle finger started to ache from using it. On both sides are ridged rubber pads, which at first I found nice, but they quickly caused my fingers to sweat and became slippery.

The mouse came with a program to configure the 4th and 5th button. The program offered some neat functionality, such as the option to have a pop up menu where you could run programs from with just a touch, but with these features came other problems. The program featured a mouse acceleration program that couldn't be turned off. By default this was configured to make your mouse move more pixels per inch (or whichever measurement you prefer) based on how quickly you move your mouse. I typically move quickly to an area at first, this caused me to overshoot wherever I wanted to click most of the time, but to make things worse as I tried to get back to that spot, moving slowly, the cursor would go incredibly slow at such a different rate as experienced before that I just couldn't get used to it.

And if that's not enough, when I plugged in my replacement mouse, and attempted to uninstall the program instead of removing the mouse driver it removed my keyboard driver... using only my mouse I had to copy and paste the characters necessary to spell out www.kensington.com from a notepad file, download the mouse program, despite no longer having a kensington mouse, before I was able to use my keyboard again.

Having never used any of Kensington's other mouses before, I can't be sure they all are this horrible, but it's just not a chance I'm willing to take anymore.

I keep my logitech mouse at work, however the model I bought is about 3 years old now. I've been using it faithfully since I bought it. But when I went to buy a new mouse for home, I found that the Logitech was no longer being made. The new mouse is longer, lower, and lighter. So while I'm very happy with the Logitech, I got the kensington because it most resembled the mouse I have.

The kensington is okay. It sets up easily enough, and the software that comes with it is marginally useful.

The real gripe I have with this mouse is that the control of the wheel is not very good. Scrolling with it is jerky at best. With the logitech, it is very smooth. So I actually find myself using the scroll bars and not using the scroll wheel at all. For being a scroll mouse, that's pretty sad.

However, I bought the mouse for home for one reason: To play Unreal Tournament 2004. My "home" computer is a laptop, and playing FPS games is absolutely impossible on a trackpad. So, for the game, the mouse is more than adequate. Its tracking is smoothe, the movement on my mousepad is fine, and it is even fairly comfortable. It has enough buttons, and is well supported by the game.

I just would not recommend it for anything other than casual use or gaming. The wheel is a real hindrance, and the quality just feels poor in comparison to my Logitech.