Almost five years ago on November 14 I had a very dark day as my beloved Logitech optical mouse, a mouse that had carried me through countless hours of Nazi and Zombie and sometimes Nazi Zombie shooting, suddenly gave up the ghost and died. Not that I can blame it as my index figure had literally worn a spot into the left mouse button from all the clicking it had suffered through (there’s a picture in the original thread). I ended up replacing it with a newer Logitech that I wasn’t entirely happy with. A little later on my buddy Hairboy bought me a Logitech MX510 gaming mouse for my birthday that I had on my wish list and I was in gaming heaven. It’s lasted me at least four of the last five years since that original dark day of mouse doom.
Tonight I was happily blasting away at Terra’rists in Call of Duty 4 when suddenly my mouse couldn’t seem to tell if I was single or double clicking the left button. My sniper rifle was shooting off double and triple shots as though my finger had suddenly gone hyper-spastic. Single shot guns rapid fired and machine guns got all confused and didn’t know whether I was holding the button down or not. Needless to say this caused more than a little trouble with actually playing the game. My mouse, it seemed, was in the last spasms before dieing. I confirmed the problem exists outside the game when I loaded up the control panel settings and cranked the double click speed all the way up to the fastest setting so that clicking the button once shouldn’t ever result in a double click, but it still does on occasion.
I loved this mouse. It’s held up pretty well considering the abuse it’s gone through during particularly bad gaming rounds. I’ve not managed to wear a spot into the left button this time, but that’s partly because it’s a much sturdier sort of plastic. With the double click setting cranked up it’s still usable as a general purpose mouse, but it’s useless for gaming now. I need to go in search of a new one and that’s a bigger problem than it might seem. Gaming has really gone mainstream in the past five years and there’s a whole slew of peripherals aimed at gamers these days. Back when I bought the MX510 the idea of a mouse specifically aimed at gamers was relatively new. Now there’s dozens of them ranging in price from $29 up to over $100. They have variable on-the-fly DPI settings and upwards of nine different buttons on some models which can be programed to execute macros. The mouse I think I want, the Razor Copperhead has a list price of $69.99 and the cheapest I’ve found it so far is $59.99. Ack. Won’t be buying that anytime soon. They have a cheaper version called the Razor Krait that’s only $39.99 with a lower resolution and minus some of the bells and whistles that might do me just fine if I can find a deal on it. Though, given that this pretty much kills my PC gaming until I can get a replacement, I’ll probably just find a cheap standard optical until we get through some of the medical bills.
The thing that’s most interesting to me is that I feel a small, but real, sense of loss over this stupid gaming mouse. You never realize how attached you can become to what is essentially a tool until it stops working properly and you have to go out and find a replacement knowing that they don’t make this model any longer. We had some good times together and now it’ll be regulated to the role of “semi-usable spare” that’ll come in handy when working on friend’s and families PCs. It’s kinda sad really. Well, just a little anyway.
Posted on 01/24/2008 at 12:25 AM 
Posted on 01/24/2008 at 06:05 AM 
Posted on 01/24/2008 at 10:54 PM 
Have you ever heard of woot.com? Just a few days ago they had the copperhead for 32.99 plus 5 dollars shipping. Of course this is no help to you now as the products are normaly one day deals only, but! They had that mouse for sale on Jan 2 (it was only 24.99 +5 shipping that day) and on Jan 13. Maybe they might have it again in 10 or so days? Just a thought.