Mousemarks

Regular mice

Regular mice, those that fall into the mouse ball serial/PS/2 variety will all function just fine on any of these pads. To try these pads out, I used my trusty old Microsoft Serial Mouse. The mouse is pretty old and falls into what some people might still have on their desk. While the average person probably doesn't have as old of a mouse, this is the most aged of the mice used for testing purposes. There isn't much to tell, as the accuracy of the serial mouse is inherently less when compared to other mice. I think there is only so much a mouse pad can do to improve this. At this point it is like trying to breathe life back into an XT. I did notice an improvement when coming from a foam pad or a desktop. However, differences between the high-end pads were hard for me to notice. Other than looking good while mousing, I think it would be a moot point to bring up performance benefits on a mouse this old.

Optical Mice

Optical mouse testing was performed with the Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer. For those that don't know, optical mice contain a camera/LED combo for movement tracking instead of balls. Quick movements turned out fine on all the pads tested. Slow movements, on the other hand, are where the oddness set in. The mouse felt jittery on all the pads during slow tracking, it seemed like it read the individual bumps that are embedded in the texture. I think this has more to do with the mouse than with the pads though. Surprisingly the mouse worked quite well on the Logitech PMS. The PMS has a semi-glossy surface that tends to ruin tracking when used with optical mice. Overall, not a bad experience on any of the pads used.

Meeses!

Boomslang

We recently started testing the Razer Boomslang 2000 and decided to drop a blurb about it in this article. The reason this mouse isn't thrown in with the other "regular mice" is because it is far from that. The mouse attains resolutions of 2,000 DPI, and up to a 200 Hz refresh rate. Making this the most sensitive mouse in the testing. This is one time when I appreciated the decreased speed caused by the Logitech pad. With sensitivity turned up all the way it is extremely hard to keep up with this mouse. The Everglide and the Ratpad worked well but will probably take a lot of getting used to. As the slickness of the pads, combined with the high sensitivity will likely have you perpetually wondering where that little arrow went. A quality mousing surface is more of a requirement than an option with this mouse. The massive size of this mouse might take people over the edges of smaller mouse pads like the Everglide Attack. The mouse functioned perfectly regardless of which pad was used.