OK. My MX700 is starting to get a little old. What do y'all
suggest as a cordless mouse for a non gamer? Rechargeable preferred.
WinDoze XP.
Thanks.
MX700 had good performance for it's era. OK, great
performance considering it was wireless (which as we had
disagreed about long ago, really is a degradation... but if
you still disagree, we can ignore this aspect of choosing a
mouse).
The MX700 downside was that it gobbled power. Having to
reseat in a recharge cradle regularly when using such large
and heavy 2 x AA cells is below par today.
Essentially you need to define which parameters are most
important, though really what is most important may be the
shape, something you'll have to try at a B&M store.
A few variables include:
Optical sensor resolution/speed. I'll assume you want at
least as good as MX700, but there are many at this level or
better today.
Pickiness of mousing surface. A certain tech, using
invisible light, is far pickier than any other type. If
you'd replace your mousing surface if required, it is less
of an issue. If not, it all depends on if the mouse likes
it. I mention this primarily because it has a large
significance against my next paragraph. Laser mice in
general work best on a variety of surfaces.
Logitech invisible light optical system based mice tend to
have the longest battery life. While you might have to
recharge the MX700 every few days, one of these Logitech
mice may run for closer to a year on alkaline or newer bread
low-self-discharge NiMH, for at least several weeks on
older-tech NiMH. Newer laser mice from Logitech also run
for weeks at a time from a pair of AA cells. The question
is then, how important is a recharge cradle if the
charging/batter-swap interval is much much longer? Further,
limiting yourself to only models having recharge cradle,
drastically decreases your choices in all other categories
including one of the most important, ergonomic/shape.
There's also size, # of buttons, if you particularly
like/dislike/etc certain manufacturer's software. With your
present mouse, you might use Logitech's Mouseware(?), but
most current generation mice use Logitech's Setpoint. Maybe
this doesn't matter, but something or other has to so being
more clear about your own subjective needs might narrow the
field a bit.
Even for non-gamers, some uses and mouse (arm/wrist/hand)
movement styles will make a higher resolution mouse better.
Depends on what you set your movement:screen-movement ration
to be, the "speed" setting in mouse mousing sofware. The
higher that speed setting is, the more you'd benefit from a
high resolution mouse, though any decent branded mouse these
days has at least as high (800DPI) as the MX700 did, but
depending on optical engine type, some are far worse at
descriminating those pixel details on the mousing surface
and some are far better, so it's not just the DPI it uses
but the threshold for descrimination of each DotPerInch.
Since shape is such a huge variable, it's a bit hard to make
any suggestion. Does it need to be used with a notebook
(smaller size and/or stowable thumbkey type receiver)?
Would it be worth choice limitation and higher price to be
bluetooth?
Logitech G7 is the most similar modern tech to MX700, and
keeping similar shape to MX700. It doesn't have recharge
cradle, but has two battery packs and one recharges while
using the other. It is probably the closest match to what
you have spec'd so far and yet one of it's primary selling
points is gaming performance which wasn't important.
Another equivalent newer generation mouse would be MX610,
but no recharge cradle. I think (could be wrong), that
MX620 is next gen tech to extend battery life over MX610.
MX Revolution is fancier, has a larger footprint.
