I travel a fair bit and use my machine on the road a lot when I do, so portability is reasonably important to me. One thing is that in the process I got really used to the small 'mobile' mice that Microsoft makes - the small Soap bar kind. I've really grown attached to this mouse and I really can't get comfortable with the monster desktop mice any more.

So the small mouse works great but one of the problems it has is that it uses a small USB stick to drive its wireless interface. The issue is that the interface is fairly small and apparently gets affected if there's no clear line of site or otherwise interference of other components. On my machine the USB ports are luckily on the right side - same side i use the mouse on - but still I've noticed on many occasions the mouse just doesn't respond as well as it should stuttering a little in the process. I find myself resetting the mouse quite frequently to resync the mouse to the transmitter after which things work again for a while.

What I didn't know until today though is that you can use some of the other 'big' mouse connectors with the laptop mouse and vice versa. I have a second 'big block' Microsoft laser mouse sitting around my office that I use for my test server here and I was pleased pink that I was actually able to use the bigger adapter with this laptop mouse just by connecting it to the laptop and synching the big radio to the smaller mouse:

If you notice the side of my laptop is pretty crowded - there are two USB ports,the network cable and the monitor all plugged in all in that small area and the little mouse USB transmitter (above the mouse in the picture) is getting blocked causing the inconsistent behavior. I think it's probably also the cause of the battery draining fairly quickly in about a month of mouse usage.

So with the big transmitter plugged in (above the mousepad) reception of the mouse is rock solid now and life is good again without worries and interference. I guess I'm going to bring this adapter with me for speaking gigs to because during a session my machine is just as busily plugged into things at the office.

Maybe the real answer are wired mice, but it's getting harder and harder to get decent 'normal' mice that are wired anymore. Most wired mice these days are either cheapo crap entry level mice or super duper high end gaming mice that aren't optimized for typical typing work.

For now I'm happy - just bummed that I didn't think of this before. I guess next stop is this presentation mouse:

which looks a little bit bigger and claims 30 feet reception range. It'll be interesting to see if that works any better without requiring the bigger USB adapter. Anybody have one of these?