Recently Microsoft has come out with a wide range of pointing devices. And we've already covered most of those. Today we have yet another wireless version of an optical mouse for review, the Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse 5000, focused at desktop users.

The Mouse
The Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse 5000 is almost identical in design to the Wireless IntelliMouse Explorer with Fingerprint Reader (this one of course doesn't have the fingerprint reader). It offers a two-tone gray color scheme with a smooth-matte finish. It is fairly ergonomic and comfortable, but for mainly right handed users. The soft rubber sides provide a smooth and comfortable resting place for the thumb and the last two fingers. The left and the right click buttons are well placed and comfortable to click as well. These also have soft tactile feedback.

The four-way scroll-wheel is easy to grip and move, however, the scroll-wheel doesn't provide a soft/tactile feedback on the middle clicks - it requires a lot of pressure, which is way too irritating considering its frequent use in today's operating systems. We miss the soft "middle click" feature a lot in their new range. Though Microsoft has focused a lot on modifying the ergonomics for comfort use, they however has got it a step down by turning this soft tactile "middle click" feature into the unwanted hard one (totally unneeded).

The Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse 5000 is a USB/PS2 mouse which runs on 2 AA batteries. The receiver comes with a 3 feet long USB cable that fits into the USB slot. Since it's a USB mouse the drivers too aren't a rigid requirement, so you simply plug the receiver into any computer with an operating system that recognizes USB mice and the 5000 will set itself up in few seconds. The mouse was recognized immediately the moment I plugged it into the USB port, and I had no radio interference glitches whatsoever.



We kept this mouse and the receiver at about a distance of 8 feet from each other to check its frequency range, and it performed pretty well. However, going any farther than this resulted in loss of connectivity. So the Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse 5000 though with a sufficient range for home users, won't really be an ideal choice for a big conference room. Its 1,000 dpi (dots per inch) capability is about average for mice in its series, and it delivers smooth, precise, and uninterrupted performance. It is also ideal for tiny work such as editing pictures on the pixel level. However, gamers who require a higher dpi and more programmability options should look for a usage specific/gaming mouse instead. But as far as the cursor tracking is considered in FPS games, this mouse was precise enough without any skips. Note that this isn't a laser mouse, but a standard LED optical mouse.

The Software
Once you've installed IntelliPoint, the Mouse control panel displays the battery level and the signal quality. It also lets you adjust the vertical and horizontal scrolling settings, and offers configuration options for all five buttons. You can also choose from 30 preset actions or have the button launch an application as specified or as configured to. The other feature is its magnifier - which is now a part to all the newly launched pointing devices by Microsoft. Clicking one of the thumb buttons, brings up a square box on the screen and lets you magnify the onscreen contents by about 2.5 times - very handy for those who work with extremely high-resolutions like 1280x1024 on relatively smaller 17-inch monitors. This feature can be very useful for those people, but I don't exceed 1152x864 so I didn't need this. Hence, I decided to configure it to a middle click instead, because the scroll wheel (middle click) isn't tactile enough and requires a lot of pressure, which is way too irritating considering the frequent use.

Final Verdict
Combining the comfortable ergonomic design and smart features with High Definition Optical Technology, this mouse offers more comfort and good precise control on the desktop than ever. However, the Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse 5000 is priced at Rs. 2,600/- with a 3 year warranty, which is just obscenely expensive.

Test unit sourced from: Text 100