Wireless Mouse: Logitech vs Microsoft

I don't like trackpads.  No, wait, let me rephrase.  I loathe trackpads.  They are a vile, hideous, oozing pus-filled plague-boil of fuckery infecting laptops everywhere.  Trackpads are the worst.  Trackpads cut NASA's funding.  Trackpads were the masterminds behind 9/11.  Trackpads invented New Coke.  Trackpads are the opposite of Batman.

So I bought a wireless mouse!

Actually, I have two wireless...mice?  Mouses?  Whatever, two of them.  One I've had for about a year, maybe a bit longer, which I bought when the wired mouse to my desktop computer stopped working.  But I didn't want to take that mouse from the desktop computer, so I got another one for my laptop a few months ago..  And now...I'm going to compare them!  WOOOOO!  I've never compared techy-stuff before, so I have no idea what I'm doing!  Wooooo?  Really, this is probably more TK's area of expertise, not mine.  This is going to be a train wreck, I can tell.  So let's get on with it!

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Well, the main thing I was looking for when I went to buy a new mouse was to find a small one, to fit my hand: I have kinda small hands, I guess, and pretty much every mouse I've ever used before buying my own was bigger than my hand.  Which I guess wasn't bad, but when I went to the mouse-store and found out "Holy shit, this one FITS IN MY HAND" it was pretty crazy!  Having a mouse that fits my palm is super-comfortable.  So both of the wireless mice/mouses/whatever I bought were like half the size of every previous mouse I've used.  After the size, I wanted a mouse-wheel.  It is so weird to use a mouse without a wheel after you've gotten used to using the wheel.  The third thing, it had to be adorable.  Or at least not-ugly.  Call me shallow all you want, but if I gotta look at it all the time it should be appealing.  Fourth thing is, I had to be able to afford it, so somewhere in the area of twenty or thirty dollars.  That's pretty much all I thought about when I went mouse-shopping.  I dunno if there's any other way to decide what you want in a mouse.  Again, I have no idea what the fuck I'm doing here.

My new mouse is Microsoft brand.  It takes one battery and has a colorful if somewhat abstract design.  I believe I bought it for around twenty dollars.  It fit my hand perfectly, measuring at three and a half inches long according to my sewing tape.

It's an okay mouse.  It's comfortable to use and has a mouse wheel and two mouse buttons, it was affordable and cute, it's, you know, a mouse.  I don't really know what else to say about it.  It doesn't have extra buttons or do anything fancy or flash or light up or anything, other than the on-light.

Congratulations on meeting the minimum standards of mousehood!

I stopped using that mouse a few months after getting it, though.  I liked it well enough, but it had a few flaws that made it a not-great mouse.  For example, the battery cap on the underside wasn't perfectly smooth, so it had a tendancy to snag on the fabric of the sofa where I was usually using it.  I adapted to that by getting a denim placemat and using it as an armchair mousepad.  The thing I didn't want to adapt to was the battery life -- I only used the mouse for a few months because I got tired of having to replace the battery every three or four weeks, even though I always turned it off when I wasn't using it.  So I plugged the Microsoft mouse into the desktop computer that I haven't used since we had to unplug and move it while we redid the floors, and I took my older Logitech mouse from there and started using that.

The Logitech mouse was I think about twenty-five or thirty dollars, but I might have gotten it on sale, I'm not sure.  But I bought it, so it must have been in my price range.  It's a good mouse.  It doesn't have any sort of design on it or anything, other than the logo, but it's a deep pretty red that doesn't really come through in the photos.  It's not as pale or orange-looking as my pictures make it seem.  It uses two batteries instead of the one that the Microsoft mouse uses, but other than that it's pretty similar.  The two mouse-buttons and the wheel, the on-light, you know, general mousy stuff.  It's slightly larger than the other mouse at four inches long, but it's still comfortable in my hand.  I think I prefer the size of the Microsoft mouse, but I like the Logitech mouse much better overall.

I've had this mouse for about a year, and I leave it on literally all the time.  I even left it on for the four months or so that the desktop computer was disconnected in the corner of my room, and it was only the other day that I had to change the batteries for the first time.  I could tell it was starting to die, because it was shutting off every now and then, but I am gonna think of that as a perk - it was letting me know that the batteries were getting low, but I could keep using the mouse by just switching it off and back on and it would work fine for another little while.  I put off replacing the batteries for as long as I could, until it was shutting off every ten minutes.  Still, it was doing that for like a month and it wasn't all that annoying, so I gotta say I am really fond of the battery life.  The only drawback to the Logitech mouse is the battery cover --  it's not on the bottom like on the Microsoft mouse, so it doesn't catch on anything, it's under my palm -- the part with the logo on it.  Like I said before, I usually use my laptop on the sofa in the living room, and use the mouse on the armrest.  The mouse gets knocked to the floor constantly, because that's a high-traffic area; I'm always shoving it with my elbow when I move the laptop, or brush it when I get up, or knock it when I reach over for a drink or something.  And every single time it falls down, the battery cover pops off.  Sometimes the cover gets lost under the sofa and I have to spend ten minutes moving furniture to reach it.  Yet despite opening so easily when I don't want it to, I could not for the life of me get it open when I had to change the batteries last week.  I had to put it on the armrest and then push it off to open it.  I'm pretty sure that's not how it was designed to work.

So overall, the Logitech mouse has a flaw or two but is the clear winner when compared to the Microsoft mouse.  I was really disappointed in the Microsoft mouse, actually.  I thought it would be way better than it was -- who puts a rough snaggy bottom on a mouse?  Not Logitech.  If you are in the market for an affordable wireless mouse and have to choose between Microsoft and Logitech, go with Logitech.  

Much less shitty than Microsoft's mouse.