Mouse recommendations??

[Dadgad]

20 bucks!?!?

Perhaps this is a better fit. One of about 20 different models they offer, all comparably priced. They buy out of China and ship everything free of charge from HK, awesome.
This from one of my all time favorite sources for just about anything. I gave these to friends almost 20 years ago, lots of fun. The one inside a watch is a good one too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ATpAPHf-ec

[oddbob]

...for me; it's always a Microsoft mouse - preferably laser rather than optical - never the squeaky type

[Cbraunheim]

Welcome Jon. I use a Logitech M570 wireless trackball in conjunction with a Saitek Cyborg gaming keyboard. The trackball has 4 regular buttons, plus the scroll wheel which acts as a 5th button. The keyboard, aside from being illuminated, has 12 programmable keys. They are arranged vertically along the ends of the keyboard. I have the 6 most common snaps on the left side, and macros to start the 6 most commonly used lisps down the right side.

I was a die-hard digitizer user for many years. Then the company I worked for sold, and the new owners wanted to "better utilize available space" so we wound up with 5 people working in the space that was previously occupied by one person. Needless to say, there was no room for a 12 x 12 digitizer. The bought us all the old style Kensington trackballs that had 4 buttons and a big ball in the middle. After about a month, I was hooked and have used trackballs ever since. I dont even know why they keep making regular mice! At any rate, on the one I use now, the ball is controlled by the thumb, leaving your fingers resting on the appropriate buttons. Unlike a mouse, this thing never moves except when I want to reposition my arm. No working off the desk, no picking it up and moving it back over, it just sits there beside my keyboard on the keyboard drawer and is at the perfect height for when I need to make the transition back to 2 hand keyboarding.

Hey, Jack - I'm with you - I love my Logitech Wireless Trackball and am lost without it. Unfortunately, I just upgraded my system to 64-bit and AutoCAD 2013. My favorite zoom/pan function with the scroll wheel is lost now... Is your system 32- or 64-bit? I need a new pointing device...recommendations?

Thank you!

[irneb]

I'm in same boat: At office I'm using this piece of dirt:
Microsoft-Wheel-Mouse-Optical-Black.jpg

And at home I've opted for something just a "tad" better:
razer-mamba-gallery10.jpg
http://store.razerzone.com/store/raz...ctID.169418100

Works as wireless AND wired, has awesome sensitivity on any surface I can think of, even my thigh . Can assign different functions per button same as all those logitech ones. Can adjust the sensitivity on the fly by simply pressing the more / less sensitive buttons - great when panning over huge drawings and then wanting to select something small in an extremely cluttered area.

For my laptop I use this one:
bluetoothnotebook50002.jpg
Just because it's bluetooth (i.e. don't need some dongle to plug into the USB port like normal wireless).

[Dadgad]

How come you don't just bring one of your better ones with you to work? I should think you would be used to having a good mouse, and that the other piece of dirt would really cramp your style. Logitech also makes a bluetooth, dongle free mouse, as well as a super tiny one, that I've only recently seen. I used Logitech for a few years, very good, wore out a couple or more of them. Now I am using E-Blue, laser on both of my laptops, 5 button, PDI adjustability via button, only about $20 in my neck of the woods.

[BlackBox]

How come you don't just bring one of your better ones with you to work?

So I recently purchased new equipment from Logitech when I got an email offering 50% off... got a new G700, G510, and since I was saving so much, I splurged for the G13 while I was at it... Only to get everything to work, and requested that IT install my new drivers (we don't have rights to do this ourselves, at +11K employees things could get crazy! LoL), to which IT requested that I promptly get my money back or take the equipment home as corporate IT doesn't want employees buying their own equipment.

In turn, IT put together a purchase request and paid full price for the equipment, which arrived with expedited shipping. LoL

[Dadgad]

This reminds me of hearing about procurement protocols for NASA and all other sorts of government contracts. Hammers being described as OMNIDIRECTIONAL MOMENTUM ENGINES and other such linguistic hokus pokus, in valiant attempts to conceal the fact that old-school (make that hickory handled) waffle heads were being purchased for hundreds of dollars apiece, at a time when they really cost about $10 to $15.
Certainly seems like a big waste of money, but hey, at least they sprung for it, instead of telling you they couldn't afford it. Could have been worse.
I recently found a site selling brand new original HP batteries (weighing in at 1 kg) for my gigantic laptop, and they were only $20, which amazed me. The domestic shipping costs in the states were more than the price of the battery. I was still delighted to get it, as it was appreciably cheaper delivered than I expected it to be.

[irneb]

Yep, fortunately my company is not (yet) such a bureaucratic nightmare. The IT director sits not 4 desks away from me, but they're "attempting" to become ISO9001 compliant and EVERYTHING needs to be "documented". Also after the last few years the co has become cash strapped and everyone's scared of splurging on anything - they're even counting prints these days. It seems to be a situation of "Penny-wise, pound-foolish" if you ask me.

As a sample: We started a project last year. It was deemed to be a "sample" project to be done entirely in Revit. Previously we'd only do the presentation modeling in Rvt - then move to DWG for the tender docs and working drawings. Needless to say, 90% of our PC's are more than 5 years old, and this project wasn't one of those small quick stuff. After battling with the primus pump in the morning just to get that old Dual-Core booted up, I finally had enough as the project (when opened in Rvt) was using 1.7GB RAM (and this was on 2009 on a 32bit - so basically I was swapping to disc as soon as I moved the mouse). So I "decided" to bring my own PC from home and use it for this project. This had un-intended results: Mainly other employees complaining to the director: "Why does he get a new PC? We've been asking for upgrades for years now!"

Needless to say, I was asked to remove my stuff as the company couldn't afford to compensate me. And when I told them that I wasn't asking for compensation the truth came out: It wasn't that they were even intending to compensate, they just wanted not to have morale drop by any more than it already was (due to the 10% paycut we took in order to keep our jobs). So I took my own PC back and worked as before: waiting 80% of my day in front of an hour-glass cursor, the rest of the time was taken up by coffee/smoke breaks

After they "realized" that productivity was non-existent, they "finally" decided to "upgrade". At least the PC's are working properly now - or rather some of them. But the old habit of cheapest possible still prevailed, and I'm unwilling to go through the same chewing out about not "making waves". So I live with a mouse which has an overly sensitive wheel (i.e. if you bump the table ACad scroll zooms / pans, if you eTransmit the scroll changes the filename without noticing to one of the previous files you made, the cursor sticks if there's a dust spec on the mouse pad, etc. etc. etc.).

[irneb]

How come you don't just bring one of your better ones with you to work? I should think you would be used to having a good mouse, and that the other piece of dirt would really cramp your style. Logitech also makes a bluetooth, dongle free mouse, as well as a super tiny one, that I've only recently seen. I used Logitech for a few years, very good, wore out a couple or more of them. Now I am using E-Blue, laser on both of my laptops, 5 button, PDI adjustability via button, only about $20 in my neck of the woods.

That's great for you guys. We have to live with stuff like exchange rates, import duties and middle-men profits ... which means that $20 mouse becomes R460 ($60) - minimum. And only if you can find it, since it's usually a nightmare to have it shipped yourself - not to mention adding another 100%+ onto that cost.
Edit: Here's proof http://www.pricecheck.co.za/offers/8...ordless+Mouse/

Usually I compare prices as much as possible. More often than not I can import something from the UK for around 50% of the cost I can buy it here. The Razer I got imported for R1300 ($164) where they sold it for $120. The bluetooth mouse was an exception, my old logitech wireless died and I simply CANNOT work with a touch-pad. So I had to go into a store and got the one they had: http://www.incredible.co.za/ProductD...aspx?SKU=64757

Compare that ZAR 700 (US$ 90) to what Amazon charges: http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Blue.../dp/B000TG4BA0