Logitech V200 Cordless Notebook Mouse

I despise touchpads. Most of my laptops have had a “pointing stick“, which works quite well. By comparison, a touchpad is, well, “touchy”. It tends to respond at inappropriate times when my hand is just near the pad but not touching it, and causes the cursor to zing off into the corner. But when I actually want to use it, it doesn’t reliably recognize the motions of my fingers.

Unfortunately, pointing sticks seem to be losing popularity to trackpads, and my latest laptop, an HP Pavilion dv5210us, has a touchpad.  Rather than continue to fight that, I purchased a Logitech V200 Cordless Notebook Mouse.

This is an optical wheel mouse that is slightly smaller than a normal desktop mouse, and uses a very small receiver “stick” that plugs into a USB port. Rather than being rechargeable, it uses a pair of ordinary AA alkaline cells. When not in use, the receiver stick can be attached to the mouse, which will press a switch on the mouse that powers it down.

Overall I am fairly happy with this mouse, but the receiver doesn’t actually tend to stay attached to the mouse when stored in the accessory compartment in my laptop carrying case. This will result in the batteries draining faster, but I can carry around spare batteries. The annoying thing is that I always have to dig around in the bag to find the receiver. Perhaps on a future version of the product they can come up with a way to make the receiver stay attached better; perhaps it could actually insert into a recess in the mouse.

Even when using the mouse, I still have the problem of the touchpad sometimes erroneously thinking that I’ve touched it. I could try to come up with a way to automatically disable the touchpad while the mouse receiver is connected, but this is probably actually forcing me to use better typing hand posture, which is actually a good thing.