Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Microsoft Basic Optical Mouse 1.0A is a piece of garbage

Some buying decisions you eventually come to regret, and the Microsoft Basic Optical Mouse 1.0A is definitely a regrettable purchase. I unfortunately purchased a large number of these several years ago, when computers were first making the transition from ball mice to optical mice, and I needed an inexpensive way to get optical mice for a large number of computers that still had ball mice..

If you associate Microsoft with poorly designed products that sort of halfway do what they're supposed to do, the Basic Optical Mouse 1.0A definitely fits the description.

It requires no drivers, and simply installs as an "HID compliant mouse". It works fine..... most of the time. When idle, the pointer stays still as you would expect.

However, on occasion when moving the mouse around, the onscreen pointer suddenly shoots off in some random direction at extremely high speed, completely out of your control. If you do a web search for the Basic Optical Mouse 1.0A and the word "random" you will find it comes up several times, with people constantly trying to find drivers or whatever to solve this.

For 1st person 3D game players, usually they end up suddenly looking at the sky or at their feet, and spinning around wildly for a few moments when the mouse suddenly malfunctions like this.

I have seen this problem on literally 50+ different Microsoft Basic Optical Mice 1.0A. There's nothing to be done about it. The hardware for all of them is apparently defective and there is nothing that can be done about it...

... other than replacing it with a different brand or model. I've never seen this intermittent random tracking problem happen with the Microsoft optical mouse that has a bright red indicator on the front of the base.

If you either dispose of or send your defective Microsoft Basic Optical Mouse 1.0A to a recycler, do the world a favor and cut the USB cord off, so that no one else looking to salvage old computer hardware has to suffer from using it.