The MX Revelation

If you approached me about 8 weeks ago, I would have told you that spending $100 on a mouse was absurd. You can get any optical mouse from the nearest store for about $5. When purchasing my laptop, my father’s superbly charismatic nature kicked in, and he managed to convince the salesman to throw in a free Logitech MX Revolution. At the time, I was boisterously excited, but would have been no less happy without it. A mouse is a mouse. Or so I thought. A quick glance at the MX Revolution will reveal your usual left and right-click buttons, a scrollwheel, a quick search button, a thumbwheel on the side, and two adjacent thumb buttons. Novelties.

Logitech MX Revolution

But the truth is, the mouse quickly began to have an effect on my computing experiance from all aspects. The laser feature meant that the mouse was surprisingly accurate. I was able to move the pointer around the screen a lot faster without having to add in correctional movements before every click. This also had a lasting effect on gaming. Wireless mice are usually useless when it comes to first person shooters, but the MX Revolution doesn’t have the same transmission lag as other wireless mice, and the precision is excellent, which was great when sniping.

The quick search button was useful, but although I search frequently, it’s not a very difficult and long-winded feat. Something I found a lot more useful was to replace it with the Vista snipping tool. This now means that I can take screenshots and send them to people in a split second, rather than my old long-winded Ctrl+Alt+PrintScrn followed by Paint or Photoshop.I assigned the thumb wheel to volume control, and this meant I could mute the volume without thinking. Highly useful in numerous situations which I’ll leave for your imagination to discover.

The scrollwheel also has a freespin feature which means on flick of a finger could take you through over a 100 pages in a document. You can also scroll left and right by nudging it either way. The back and forward thumb buttons do exactly that on webpages, but can be re-assigned like every other button in the mouse.

Something which used to annoy me about my old mouse was how I had to replace the batteries every 3 or 4 weeks. The MX revolution is rechargeable, and comes with a charging stand, even though the battery lasts about 2 weeks without charge. Plug and play means plug and play with this device as well. No scrabbling, waving, or endless clicking in order to try to get the computer to reconginse it. It’s also very comfortable in your hand, and looks extremely stylish.

What I realised after about 2 months of use was that I could no longer live without this mouse. It’s features were so useful they quickly became second nature, and my overall computer efficiency improved dramatically. Almost all interactions with computers nowadays are through a keyboard and mouse, and when browsing the web, you couldn’t do without a mouse. For those who use computers on a regular basis, you should greatly consider getting a good-quality mouse like this. I spend so many hours on a computer every day, that this mouse is irreplaceable. And it only kicked in after I found myself trying to use a non-existent thumb wheel on another PC a couple of days ago.