Customer Reviews

Microsoft Comfort Optical Mouse 3000

5 star:		(103)
4 star:		(47)
3 star:		(31)
2 star:		(35)
1 star:		(45)

 

 

Like many people I tend to use the middle button quite a lot to open new tabs in my web browser. If you are one of these people, look elsewhere, because the Comfort Optical Mouse 3000 is awful.

It takes quite a bit of effort to actually depress the mousewheel, and when you do, it doesn't always register as a mouseclick (despite a fairly audible sound when you do so). I don't know if it's a driver issue or a hardware issue but it sporadically happens with every Comfort Optical 3000 on every PC in our company. Other Microsoft mice on the same PCs using the same drivers work fine.

I will be the first to criticize Microsoft when they add onto bloatware, release software which is not yet ready for market, and on and on......and yet I will also give credit where credit is due. The Microsoft Optical Mouse 3000 is an excellent product and a great value.

The Microsoft Optical Mouse 3000 is simply a well designed mouse and dollar for dollar, it is very hard to beat. Initially, I went to the office supply store to find a cheap optical mouse as mine kept on getting jammed with crud.....I had seen some optical mice advertised as low as $6.95. But once you see them in person, and feel them in your hands, you soon realize exactly **why** they are only $6.95. The 3000 feels nice in your hand, and has features built in for this price range which are, quite frankly, surprising. One is the 5X zoom feature- keep your hand on the mouse and click a button on the side and voila! Instant 5x magnification of a small area around the cursor. Very nice. You will probably not always use it, but it is a nice function to have at hand. Another very nice feature(which you most likely will use) is the lateral scroll with the wheel. No more clicking and dragging on the elevator to move left and right.....simply push the wheel left and right, and you will scroll in that same direction.

Again, Microsoft has its shortcomings and I will be the first to say so. But I will also give credit where credit is due.....and for the money, this mouse cannot be beat. Buy it.

I miss my old "Dove soap bar" Microsoft Mouse 2.0. That said, this mouse is the latest in a long line of good, basic, classic mice. It is the symmetrical design that, well, I prefer, and it has the benefit of having a larger scroll wheel than some of the newer pointing devices on the market. Unlike previous MS mice, this wheel does not have "click gradations," so you may have to get used to the "free" scrolling action.

But overall, the size is good for an average man's hand, the buttons large with positive feedback, and the click action of the scroll wheel is near effortless. Both vertical and new, horizontal scrolling is handy in some larger applications. It makes scrolling in Excel on both axes (up/down, left/right) PARTICULARLY convenient.

The addition of the third, thumb button can be used for any number of very useful functions, programmed with the IntelliPoint software. The long list includes a magnifying pane, double-clicking, page navigation in Explorer and Internet browsers, Show/hide desktop, and a rather interesting "Gaming toggle" to which you can program two sets of keystrokes. It can also be clicked to boost precision, to exert extra-fine control of your cursor movement; users of Photoshop, Windows Movie Maker and large screen resolutions (1600x1200 and up) will really appreciate this toggle.

If you're looking for a simple, affordable mouse for your desktop, or to travel with your laptop, it's hard to find as good a mouse, at as affordable a price. Last bonus: it looks nice, not garish.

One of the buttons on my mouse stopped working recently, so I needed to get a new one. I didn't have any particular mouse in mind for my purchase. I just wanted a basic working mouse. The reviews on this mouse were pretty good, so I bought it in spite of a few bad reviews that concerned me. I should have listened to the bad reviews. I'm a computer engineer and I spend all day on the computer, so the mouse matters a lot although normally the standard Dell or Logitech mouse does just fine.

The scroll wheel, ahh that scroll wheel. You don't realize how important the scroll wheel is until it doesn't work correctly. The scroll wheel is extremely hard to turn on this mouse causing my brain to trigger a "there's something wrong here" reaction every time I turn it. I have probably 5 different mice in my office, since I have a lot of computers and I can use any of them without really noticing much of a difference, but this one is grating. It feels like someone has their foot on the brake while you're trying to make it move forward. It's so annoying, that I'm considering taking it apart to try to find out what is causing such a high level of friction when turning the mouse wheel or just outright throwing it in the trash. What a waste of a good mouse. Everything else seems to work fine besides this unforgivable flaw.

The middle button (mouse wheel) needs to be clicked just so to get the click to register. The click is incredibly heavy. Operating the wheel tilt feature requires so much force, it's almost unusable. This is a repetitive strain injury waiting to happen.

Occasionally, while performing click-and-drag operations, the mouse will "unclick" before the button mechanically "unclicks". This makes dragging files around very exciting. Who knows what folder they will wind up in!? I had the same problem (worse, actually) with a Microsoft Explorer Mouse I tried a month ago.

This mouse does not work on my desktop (other optical mice work fine), and *requires* a mouse pad. I haven't seen that problem since the laser mice from the 1980's!

Do not buy.

In March 2005 I bought an Apple G5 and nearly two years later the only thing I can say that was cheap about it was the mouse: no right-click and the clicking for cutting and pasting on my website stopped working. Additionally, it started to make a creaking sound, another sign of cheapness.I didn't want to spend 50 bucks on the "Mighty Mouse" so I took a chance on the Microsoft 3000 at half the price. Following the instructions, I did not put the Microsoft 3000 mouse into my USB port until AFTER I downloaded the included software, which took 5 minutes or so. The results have been excellent. More mouse comfort, easier gliding motion, right click function, magnification function. The 3000 has proven to be a more than worthy upgrade for my iMac G5.

I have several complaint about this mouse...

1. the center wheel is Very hard to click...
so it makes opening links in a new tab,(FireFox) Very Annoying...

2. it's i little stiff to scroll sideways with the Wheel
(witch is why I bought it)it makes my finger shake...

3. the center wheel doesn't spin freely,
there's some resistances, witch feels awkward...

4. the wheel on my old mouse clicked,
it provided a tactile feedback, witch I liked...

5. the left and the right buttons are way to sensitive,
you cant rest your fingers on them at all,
(if you do, you've clicked on a link)
so you end up holding your fingers up in the air,
witch I find painful after a while...

good points

1. I like the way the Lft&Rit buttons don't appear separate from the rest of the mouse.
2. I like the little Magnifying button on the side
3. I did like the new driver,(I didn't think I would)
(you do have to install the driver if you want to scroll Lft&Rit)
and being able to remap the buttons.

When my previous mouse started to give me problems, I chose this mouse.

It is simple to use, with very smooth operation.Like its name, it is comfortable to use too. The controls are simple.

I also like the look of it, I was looking at a very flashy red model, then decided on this one instead, as it's very reasonably priced.

I am very happy with it and would recommend it to anyone replacing their mouse.

The software has a magnify "feature" that blows up the screen to a huge size. A button on the mouse turns this on and off. Well, the software decided to turn the total zoom on everytime i booted up or quit out of an application. i needed to use the mouse button to turn it back off. While zoomed, it got so large that all i could see on my screen was the point of my cursor, making any navigation impossible. only a square inch or of my normal screen was accessible, and it was so large and blurry that nothing could be done anyway.

I made the mistake of thinking i could turn zoom off in the mouse software preference pane in System Preferences. Once I turned it off, the huge zoom continued, but now I could not even turn it off using the mouse button! There was no human way to get back to the preference pane to turn the software back on, due to the cursor being the only visible item on my screen-no menus, no nothing.

The install disk does not contain a remove feature. so i could not get the software off my computer, period. Even my trash could not be emptied when I previously tried to trash the microsoft mouse preferences, as "MicrosoftMouseHelper" was running invisibly and using those preferences in the trash.

So I wrote to Microsoft support. What a joke that turned out to be. They told me to go to the preference pane to turn the software on and off. Of course, that was physically impossible. They ignored my email writing back telling them this was not possible due to the zoom taking over my screen.

Luckily, my programmer walked me through breaking into my user account and trashing my entire preference folder. This solved the problem, but caused me to lose a lot of other needed preferences, some of which i painstakingly got back one by one.

So beware the software! It is terrible and can not be removed. I felt more like I had a virus than properly written software.

There is no option to rate a product zero stars, so I had to give it a 1.

As an electrical engineer I cringe when someone says electromagnetic interference because its usually an excuse for something else. Well not in this case. if a cell phone or Blacberry is nearby or if one rings the mouse constantly disconnects itself. Sometimes it re-connects sometimes you have to just reboot the machine.

The mouse functions fine otherwise the scroll wheel is a little heavy and hard to click but that is not a feature I look for. The magnify button was the reason I bought it and its very useful if you are right handed which I am. Right now I am using it left handed due to some recent hand surgery and its unusable left handed.

I have moved my mobile devices to the other side of the desk but if the problem keeps up I will probably get a new mouse. Good luck getting help from MS, thier products website really needs a user forum but I'm guessing they are afraid of too much negative feedback.