I found this to be a very good mouse, overall. The size is good for my hand. The weight is perfect. The housing is coated, for the most part, with a rubber that feels very good between the fingers. The battery is inserted in a very elegant manner - angled off to the left. My wrist feels very good using it. The catch for the battery/receiver compartment is solid and well designed. The mousewheel is soft rubbery and indexed, and it rolls well under the finger. The range is a little bit weak, I suppose, but you wouldn't notice if you have the receiver close to the mouse; I guess that's what you get with a mouse which is powered with one aaa battery. And I wouldn't want the extra weight and size which would be imposed if it took two aaa batteries.

The mouse has an on/off switch on the bottom - which is very pleasant if you want to make sure to save the batteries when not in use. There is also a button which controls the speed of the mouse cursor - 800, 1200, or 1600 dpi. I'm not sure why mouse manufacturers have felt compelled to add this feature. You can usually easily control mouse cursor speed from the operating system mouse control panel.

The only drawback to this mouse, is that apparently there's some weird firmware which controls the way the mouse feeds coordinates to the computer. If you move the mouse quickly, there isn't a one for one relationship between how far you moved the mouse, and how far the cursor actually moved. It is slow for the first half a second, and then speeds up... The general effect, is that even with varied speed of the mouse on the pad, the mouse cursor motion stays even. It's very odd. My reason for buying a laser mouse was the increased precision I would get from it... and this mouse's motion feels kind of sloppy. Basically, I find that I have to move back to buttons after overshooting them. And one has to move very slowly if you want precision, which I find increases strain on my wrist.

My guess is that because there is some weakness to the mouse's wireless signal, this sloppy motion tends to hide any actual hesitations, which happen because the signal didn't get through immediately.

This is another mouse I bought recently. Excellent workmanship went into it. It's made by Logitech. The model is the "VX Nano." I bought it off of ebay for about 60% of what it was selling for at normal internet retailers, and half of what it was selling for at my local office depot.

It is a laser mouse, and as such, it will track well on any surface that isn't reflective or clear.

As you see, it has a little wireless receiver, and the range is excellent. I could easily use it from the next room fifteen or twenty feet away, if I wanted to, and I have done so, on occasion.

It has a nice suave little compartment on the bottom for both the batteries, and to store the receiver when not in use.

It takes two AAA batteries. I don't know the full extent of the battery life, but I haven't had to replace them in the month since I got the mouse. So, it appears that the battery life is excellent.

If you are using this mouse with a microsoft windows operating system, there are many ways you can reprogram the buttons to do specific things for specific programs. With the left and right mouse buttons, you can only swap them, you cannot reprogram them or turn them off. And unfortunately, you cannot assign a combination of mousebutton plus keyboard action to any of the buttons. I had hoped that with this mouse I could pan and zoom all from the mouse on my 3d modeling program. No such luck.

You see there are two extra buttons way up front on the left, these are really accessible only with the fingertip, not with the thumbs as is the case with other multi-button mice. There are two extra actions you can get by tilting the mousewheel left and right. If you press the scrollwheel you change the action of the wheel from indexed to free-spinning. The middle mouse button, as you see, is right there behind the mousewheel.

The free-spinning effect on the mousewheel feels really nice under your finger, and it's efficient for spinning up to the top or the bottom of the page quickly. However, most programs out there expect the wheel to be indexed, and so they'll scroll windows in a clicky fashion, even though you'd think the motion ought to be smooth. Also, the free-spinning wheel means that if the mousewheel is moved a little accidentally, unexpected things can happen on your screen. On the other hand, the indexed mode of the mousewheel works just fine, but feels rather sloppy under your finger. There's a texture to the vibration when it moves that feels as if the mechanism wasn't machined properly inside.

The mouse is about equivalent in size to the typical ball mouse seven or eight years ago. It doesn't feel small to me, but it will certainly feel small to many people who are used to using newer bulky mice. It weighs 3½ ounces with the batteries.

Sadly, this mouse is way too heavy and large to be comfortable for my hand. I started feeling the wrist strain within half an hour of use.

    
(Touch thumbnails to see larger control panel images.)

Well, I bought a couple of new computer mice recently, trying to find one that works for me. This is one which will likely be my favourite computer mouse for awhile. The brand name is Eblue, and the model is "Trozo."

The workmanship is fair, only. It's a laser mouse, rather than an led/optical version. It's a radio frequency wireless mouse, but the range is pretty minimal... It will start skipping if there's anything in the line of sight between the mouse and the little receiver which you see here. The mousewheel action feels rubbery and indexed, but there's a problem where it hangs up and then releases when you roll it up; the wheel rolls fine in the down direction. It takes a single AAA battery, and with heavy use that lasts no more than three or four days (so it's best to use rechargeable nickel metal hydride batteries).

According to the pictures in the pamphlet that is packaged with it, apparently a regular flash of red light under the mousewheel means that there is a low battery. Sadly, this happens immediately after installing a fresh lithium or alkaline battery.

On the up side, the mouse is rather stylish. It has a nice rubber rim around the outside which feels good in your fingers. It's very light. With the battery inside, it weighs about 1½ ounces, which makes it really easy to use all day long.

Because it's a laser mouse, it works well on all different kinds of surfaces. The pattern or color doesn't matter - as long as the surface isn't shiny or clear.

The mouse has a trick you can use to change the speed of the cursor motion. If you press and hold both buttons simultaneously, and wait for a rapid pulse of light under the mousewheel, you can get the next in a series of options: slow medium or fast motion.

The trozo mouse turns itself off rather quickly if it's not in use. And to get it to turn back on, you have to press one of its buttons.

As you see, it's tiny. And that's the reason I bought it. I have found that really tiny mice that I can lift without effort between my thumb and pinky finger are much easier on my hand. There is less inertia when you move it the pointer from place to place, so it doesn't tire your hand out. The arch of your fingers has to be very high, in order to press the buttons, and that really takes the stress off of your wrist.

It always makes me shake my head in wonder to see how manufacturers believe that big heavy mice that are molded to the person's hands are "ergonomic." They aren't. That style promotes wrist strain, rather than alleviating it. Light, very small mice that require a high and angular finger arch are much easier on the hand.

Further developments and observations: the battery compartment lid catch tab broke off within two weeks; this would make it very awkward to use as a notebook mouse. It seems to me that the mouse has a reliable range of about 1 meter without any obstruction in the way. The mouse does not work with dos programs such as XOSL and Norton Ghost; it does, however work fine with Linux. I wrote to a technical support email address inquirypro@e-blue.jp, but received no response.

For several years now, I have really enjoyed using the Sonique audio player. When I first downloaded it - it had already been discontinued. It seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle when another company bought its owner - Lycos.

It's really artfully designed, with some very unique features. In this mode you see here, the length of the song is actually displayed in a circle of lights which surrounds the lower section, while an animation appears in the upper section. The buttons are all animated, and they have great lighting effects on them.

If you press the up arrow from this point, you get to another screen - a square version of the program, and from there, you can choose three or four layouts - one which gives you a playlist, another which gives you an equalizer, or one which gives you a more traditional playbox more reminiscent of windows media player.

Since it was always free, and since it has been discontinued by its maker, I have taken the liberty to upload it to my website, and you can

download it here

The above download is unavailable temporarily, as I transfer my files to a new webhost.

It runs great on windows '98, windows XP, and windows Vista.

The most fickle piece of equipment one has to buy in order to build a computer is the hard disk. I will relish the day when we can transition completely to solid state disks. Taking out moving parts will really increase the reliability of the personal computer by leaps and bounds. I just spent the weekend dealing with an unforeseen problem. I had two Western Digital Caviar Green series disks fail on me. One was a 750GB box, and the other was a one Terabyte box. Needless to say, I will never buy that particular series of disk again, and Western Digital has lost me as a loyal customer. I latched on to Western Digital after years of being a loyal Maxtor customer. I felt I needed to find a brand I could trust - and in this case, that trust was misplaced.

My sneaking suspicion is that hard drive manufacturers find it cheaper to leave the production line running, and sell a few palettes of bad disks when they find an error and then accept them back under RMA. This happened recently with AMD processors - except in that case that company was honest enough to be transparent about the problem - it was a series of early quad core cpus which had what was known as a "translation lookaside buffer" problem (or TLB bug).

My practice for buying parts for my computer is to use the Newegg store. This company has places for hobbyists and technicians to leave feedback and information for other customers to read about the quality of the goods which they purchased. This allows you to see where there might be a bad batch of stuff before you encounter the same problems other people have stumbled upon.

The thing I look for most is overall enthusiasm on the part of the customers who bought the product. When I was looking to buy a notebook computer, I chose the asus eeepc - because there was an entire fan website set up for really happy customers - and these people were very knowledgeable technically about the product.

The other thing I look for is: are there failures of the product, or drawbacks - and what are they? Know that you are buying something with the drawbacks which are listed by people. Don't hope that you can magically avoid those problems which they discover.

In the case of hard disks, it seems to me that every brand has a bad batch which they sell, occasionally. The key is to see are there any failures written about on the first couple pages of comments ; and if so... how does the disk fail? I can deal with a disk arriving and being completely unusable a lot easier than I can deal with a disk that fails after thirty days or six months. I can also deal more easily with a disk which fails slowly with write errors, than a disk which fails suddenly with that clicking sound which means a head has entirely broken off the apparatus.

For other equipment, I try to steer clear of what people call the "bleeding edge" (or what is commonly known as "the cutting edge"). My experience is that the newest most exciting technology is often immature, and I've seen a lot of things in this world sold to very wealthy customers which are really prototype kinds of equipment that doesn't work very well. The general rule with computer equipment is that things will come down in price dramatically when the production quantity goes up... and at that point, the manufacturing processes will be perfected. So I earnestly disagree with the popular idea that you "get a better product for a higher price."

And in general, there is a certain ethic of high quality workmanship which some companies have that others don't. This expresses itself in a thousand little usability details being taken care of. I just splurged and bought this mouse after having held it in my hand and pined after it at my local office depot store. The rubber grips, and the smooth mousewheel all scream at you the notion that it is high quality workmanship.

I want to mention my favorite tool for creating a computer which can boot into different operating systems:

It's called Xosl.

The only other multiboot tools out there that I've been able to find are text based systems. There's the standard microsoft tool, and then there is something linux afficiandos call "Grub."

Apparently the original author of the tool, Guert Vos, isn't anywhere to be found these days, but XOSL is still a great thing. The only update I really would like to see is for it to support NTFS partition labels. It's difficult to see which partition is which without labels.

A word to the wise: Don't try to install a second operating system on your computer without knowing exactly what you're doing. You need some background knowledge about what a "master boot record" is, and what a "partition boot record" is - and you have to know how the computer boots up.

Dan Goodell gives a great overview of how to set up several different versions of microsoft software here.

There's a uk organisation which has mapped out all the quirks about multibooting with Vista, here.

To get linux to boot, I simply have xosl pointed to a partition where the grub bootloader is installed.

I'm not accustomed to writing reviews about companies. I haven't even done this for my own sister's web business though she asked me to, a couple years ago. I hate doing it, because it looks really bad on a website - and a lot of people who write these kind of articles are doing it disingenuously. But I just had an excellent experience ordering glasses from a company which is called Zenni Optical. They basically sell you glasses with relatively inexpensive frames at bargain prices. Their lowest priced glasses are $8.00 - and that includes both the price of molding the lenses, and the cost of the frames. I got a rimless pair with titanium metal ear and nose pieces for $50. The frames are fair to middling in quality - nothing special really - but they are respectable... and the lenses are just as good as any pair you would buy for a lot more money. You need to have your prescription (they don't check the date ;-) ), and also what they call a "pd measurement" - which is the distance between your pupils in millimeters. If you walk into your local big box store's optical department, they'll probably give you a pd measurement for free. It's really a company which is well worth checking into. A new pair of glasses can be a real burden financially for some folks who live meagerly like myself.