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Posted by
Toby Crundwell
on October 24, 2001
Company: Microsoft
Product: Trackball
Explorer
Movement
Microsoft’s blurb
boasts, “The IntelliEye optical sensor tracks the movement
of the ball 2,000 times per second to give you unbelievable
smooth, precise control”. Whilst undoubtedly smooth, I
would argue against precise. When first booting up, I was
amazed by how sensitive the device was. Just a small turn
and the cursor had moved the whole way across the desktop.
After turning the mouse sensitivity down, I was able to get
a little bit more control over the device. However the mouse
still felt rather loose, especially compared to the Kensington
turboball. Whilst fluidity may be a highly desired
quality for some, I found it gave the device the tendency to
glide beyond the desired point, and so much reducing
accuracy. I was able to get used to this, but it is a very
different sensation from in other trackballs and initially
very awkward.
This fluid movement
is probably due to the lack of moving parts in the device.
Normally, trackballs would have rollers on the inside to
track the movements of the ball. If the ball moves to fast,
the friction from the rollers acts to slow down the ball.
Because the Trackball Explorer has no such parts, the ball
has a nasty habit of spinning past the desired point if your
finger ever comes off the ball. The oversized mouse ball in
itself did not seem to make any difference in control,
although admittedly it was more comfortable than my previous
trackball.
Installation
Installing the device
was as simple as plugging it in. Windows 2000 automatically recognized
it and I was instantly able to use it. An installation of
the bundled Intellipoint software later and I was able to
change the functions of each mouse button. The device is
natively USB, but is supplied with a PS/2 adapter. You can
use the PS/2 adapter and then change the sampling rate, but
for most purposes I would recommend using the USB port, for
its higher default sampling rate. USB devices do use some
CPU cycles, but with any CPU over 300Mhz this should not be
a concern. I was able to plug the Explorer into both my root
USB ports and the USB ports on my Microsoft keyboard without
any grief.
Software
As mentioned above,
the Explorer comes with Microsoft’s Intellipoint software,
which for the most part just acts to change the button
functions from a wide selection of functions, including
actions in your browser (i.e., forward, back, stop, refresh,
et cetera), as well as keystrokes and basic windows actions
(such as launch the start menu).
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