Should Your Mouse be Wireless?

Over the years I have had several wireless mice on my computers and pretty much everytime I got sick of them for some reason and went back to a wired mouse.

I have also had this discussion with lots of my customers and my usual mresponse is:

"Some are OK, but finding them can be tricky".

You see, there's no way to know if a wireless mouse is terrible until you've paid for it and tried it out.

They are usually dearer than wired mice so not many people fancy the hassle of endless returns or the expense of buying a number of them in the hope one is good.

In my experience there are a few main problems:

1) Battery life - you can bet the batteries will fail when you don't have any spares AND when you are most pressed for some kind of deadline.

I have seen rechargable mice but not recently. They tend to add a new level of frustration as you have to wait for them to recharge before you can use them again.

2) Sleep mode - the need to be battery operated means they will all try to save power in various ways. The worst issue, for me, is that waking a mouse up from sleep mode (or whatever power saving thing they do) is often problemmatic.

When you need to click a mouse an extra time to wake it up, but you don't really know if it is asleep or not, you end up double-clicking and single-clicking based on an assumption that you can't test without clicking...so weird things happen...and that can be very annoying!

3) Dongles, Bluetooth and connecting the mouse - the problem with USB dongles is that they get lost. People forget that their mouse uses a dongle and somewhere along the line they lose it. Some of the USB dongles protrude too much and when used on a laptop present a danger to the USB sockets themselves...they'll be bumped eventually and both will be broken.

Bluetooth is good but it can be fiddly to set up and then keep working. It requires that you computer has Bluetooth built in, most laptops do these days, but not all desktops. But at least it doesn't require a dongle.

So what seems simple, is actually a bit tricky.

I haven't bought a wireless mouse lately and don't really plan to.

But if you are, then here's an article I received recently that may help you avoid buying a dud wireless mouse.

Good luck and let me know how you get on (so I can warn or recommend accordingly).

https://www.reviewgeek.com/43564/the-6-best-wireless-mice-to-cut-the-cord-with/

David