Digital Trends

Microsoft SideWinder Mouse

December 5th, 2007 | by Josh Norem

Use and Testing

We plugged the SideWinder into a free USB port and rested our hand upon it. Our initial thought was that it was surprisingly comfortable. The forward and back buttons lie just out of reach of your thumb, but you only need to move your thumb a few millimeters to reach them and it’s something we got used to very quickly. To be honest, we thought we’d hate this design but it’s actually very effective.

We installed the Intellipoint software but decided to leave everything on default settings. Customizing the buttons is very easy, if you want to do that. You can also set specific buttons to do certain things with specific programs.

The Intellipoint software is very easy to use and lets you customize all the mouses’ buttons.

We ratcheted up the DPI to 2000, since this is what we’re most comfortable with and found the mouse to be very precise. We fired up Crysis and played for hours, and came away impressed. The mouse feels a little big for our tastes and our hand, but it’s not uncomfortable. We just wish it was a smidge smaller at the back where it meets our palm.

Next we decided to play around with the weights and though we never opted to use them on the Logitech G9 mouse, we found adding 20g made the SideWinder a bit more accurate. We also really like the feel of the scroll wheel. It’s easy to press (something that is very important in Crysis since you use it to control the nanosuit) and the scrolling was smooth and predictable.

We replaced the stock grey mouse feet with the black ones from the included case, but didn’t notice a significant difference in feel. It would be helpful if Microsoft labeled the feet like “extra smooth” or “not as smooth” or something so we’d know what effect adding them would have.

One feature that is touted with this mouse is the ability to make macros, but we never figured out how to use it. We pressed the “record macro” button and saw an indicator on the LCD that had a mouse with an arrow pointing down. We were not sure what that meant, but we moved the mouse around a bit and waited to see if something would happen, but nothing did. We looked for a macro tab in the software and didn’t see anything. We never use mouse macros, so this wasn’t a big deal to us, but Microsoft needs to work on making this process more intuitive.

Conclusion

Microsoft has a winner on its hands here. We admit we were skeptical about this mouse prior to reviewing it but we came away impressed. The mouse has excellent tracking ability, a wide array of customization options, and feels good in our hand. The LCD is neat and the red ground effects look snazzy. Some people with smaller hands might think it’s a bit too big, but overall it worked quite well for us in testing. Is it better than Logitech’s G9 Laser? That’s a matter of preference really, but we will say it has equal performance, despite the G9’s higher DPI setting of 3200, which we felt was a bit too high.

Pros:

• Excellent tracking ability
• Great features
• Snazzy LED

Cons:

• A bit large
• Macro creation is confusing