More Explorer

Buttons

I guess we discussed most of the button changes in the design changes, rest assured that the buttons do click rather nicely.

Mouse feet

We're not sure if the composition of the mouse feet changed with this new revision, but love them regardless. The movement is about as smooth as can be without oiling up the mouse pad. One of the other guys in the office is still using the old Explorer, and the feet are still going strong after over a year of use. We found out from Microsoft that the feet are made from a nylon-based material.

Performance

As with the Logitech mouse, tracking on the new generation of Microsoft mice has improved considerably. Movement was as smooth as silk when doing normal tasks. Leaving the sensitivities at normal levels the mouse performed spectacularly. For gaming purposes, this mouse is a sure pick. According to Microsoft, the optimal settings for these mice reside in leaving the sensitivity bar at default, and then adjusting the acceleration to the desired level.

These mice also have a dark side. Just like the Logitech, the problem of tracking is not entirely licked. For most cases it is solved, but the occasional oddball will experience some trouble. The mouse also had troubles tracking with slow movements, which we will discuss later.

The other side

Put some pants on!

Old and new Explorer

Drivers

We like the new drivers from MS, but we wish they would come out with something similar to the Logitech Web Wheel. That thing is really hard to give up. The one feature that MS has over Logitech is the ability to map buttons to particular programs. When that program is active, the buttons on the mouse automatically adjust to whatever functions you want in that particular program. Once you are in the global space again, the default button configuration takes over. We'd also like to give kudos to the low memory usage of the Intellipoint drivers, a scant 2 MB, roughly five times less than the Logitech drivers.

A gripe that might go to the driver team for the mouse, or the designers of Windows XP, is the lack of a setting for acceleration. From what we were told, the mouse driver team was not allowed to mess with XP code, which already included an acceleration feature, aptly dubbed - Enhanced Pointer Precision. The driver team for the mouse was not allowed to program in varying levels of acceleration when tailoring the drivers to XP. Sadly, the recommended sensitivity setting cannot be maintained in XP, due to the fact that acceleration can only be turned on and off, and not set at a specific level. The sad thing is that the help menu makes no mention of this. The end user is simply left wondering where these features are. With other OSs (98SE, Win2K) this did not prove to be a problem.