Soooo, my venerable Logitech MouseMan+ decided to be a total whore and randomly stop scrolling sideways yesterday. I cleaned it out 3 times, and scraped off the now-peeling fuzzy stuff on the actual wheels inside, which were gumming up the works, and managed to improve the sideways scrolling from 1-in-4 attempts to 1-in-3. Still unacceptable, so today I ran out and got a new optical wireless mouse. The old mouse was, I believe, the second or third mouse model which featured a scroll wheel, and I know that it was well over 6 years old—complete with a six-year buildup of skin-oil, which has actually eaten through the rubber (groovy).
Anyhow, I got a Kengsington PilotMouse, which felt the best at the store, but could use a smidge of fixing so far as the optics go (it tends to jump around between pixels occasionally), and has a base station that’s overly sensitive to other electronics (I had to put it on my bookshelf). But it looks cool, and isn’t that really the important thing when it comes to shelling out for computer hardware these days (rather than “does it work” and “will it last”).
James Cape 