REVIEW:
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I'm not obsessed with wireless keyboards or mice; I find the cords can usually be put out of sight without much trouble. So the Microsoft Comfort Optical Mouse 3000 is a good bet for my kind of day-to-day work.
Civilization microprose cost of research examples. It's almost perfectly symmetrical from the top. I say 'almost' because there is a button on the left side, which defaults to a 'magnifying glass' to enlarge text or photos.
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Right-handed people will operate the button with their thumbs, which is natural, but lefties will have to do something about getting at it with the ring finger, which is not natural. Like most mice, all the buttons - left and right, a tilting scroll wheel and the side button - can be reprogrammed, which partially makes up for the issue.
It's a sexy silver-and-black thing - well, the black part is really a translucent deep red that you can see when the optical tracker light has been turned on - and it handles well on any surface, no mouse pad required. Microsoft has put in some new stuff to make it more accurate than previous mice, and called it High Definition Optical Technology, which operates on a scale of 1,000 dots per inch, making it ideal for tiny work, such as editing pictures on the pixel level.
What I like most about this mouse is that I find myself not maintaining a death grip on it, as I do some other mice. The practice gives me repetitive strain injury, which is no fun. By reading the surface it's on accurately and not requiring excess pressure, it delays whatever therapy I might have to seek in the future. Maybe not at all, either, given the responsiveness of its tracking system and button action.
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(I keep recalling the old Microsoft mouse, which had a ball inside it. The ball turned tiny rollers inside the mouse, and the rollers ended up with fuzz on them, making the mouse progressively more irritating to use. It was then that I realized that whenever the rollers got gummy and needed to be cleaned, I would be holding the mouse with all my might, which is not a Good Thing.)
This mouse, moreover, has been designed to fit not only left- and right-handed people, but also to work with just about any computer still running, including Apple Macintosh machines running OS X 10.2 or higher, and can connect either via a USB port or PS/2 port.
There is a downside to all this extra sensitivity, however. The mouse skids so easily on some surfaces that the cursor tends to slip from any pre-selected spot, meaning that repetitive clicking will require repositioning the cursor almost every time.
It boils down, then, to what the user wants it for. It might be a little too zippy for general office work, but just right for sensitive work, such as design and photo editing. And even better, it works for families, in which both left-handed and right-handed users work on the same machine.
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Design
Microsoft has had a long history of having a couple of basic mice in its line-up. These aren't the star products in the line, bedecked with fancy new experimental features, but have, instead, the workhorse-style numbers that eschew both doodads and design notes. That's the Comfort Mouse 3000 in a nutshell, really. It's an all-black cabled mouse with a light diamond pattern inlaid on the lower sides, two mice buttons and a clickable scroll wheel.
We don't normally comment that much on packaging in our reviews, but the Comfort Mouse 3000 drew our ire in this respect. It's presented in a display-style box that undoubtedly looks good on a store shelf, but which is quite tricky to actually open without tearing. Needless to say, our pristine review sample rather quickly had a tear in the packaging. We would apologise to Microsoft for this problem, were it not a problem that Microsoft itself had caused.
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Features
Like the recently reviewed Express Mouse, and as mentioned in the design paragraph, the Comfort Mouse 3000 is a two-button, USB-connected mouse. That's what you pay the low entry price for, and that's exactly what you get. It features Microsoft's BlueTrack technology, which means that the optical laser has a pleasant blue hue and, more specifically, that it'll track over a wider variety of surfaces with greater precision â at least in theory.
Ms Comfort Mouse 3000
Also in common with the Express Mouse is the inclusion of a 73-page Microsoft Product Guide, filled with information about products that have nothing to do with the Comfort Mouse 3000, as well as a slender two-page, two-line setup guide that boils down to plugging the mouse in and telling you to download software that you almost certainly don't need for a mouse this simple.
Performance
The Comfort Mouse 3000's style might be simple, but the diamond pattern inlaid on it does give it a small amount of, dare we say it, slightly comfortable grip. The shape of the mouse should make it suitable for both right- and left-handed use, although we only tested it with right-handed users. Sorry to all the southpaws out there; we're speculating here.
Ms Comfort Optical Mouse 3000
Accuracy was decent across a range of tested surfaces, although, as with other BlueTrack devices, if you do have to use it on a glass-topped surface, you'll see accuracy go right out the window. For most users of this mouse, this is unlikely to be a particular problem.
Microsoft Comfort Optical Mouse 3000 ManualConclusion
The Comfort Mouse 3000 isn't the most comfortable mouse we've ever used, but that's more down to its shape and desire to work for as many possible hand shapes and sizes as possible. It's an entirely workable mouse, albeit not a terribly fancy one, but what would you expect for under thirty bucks?
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