I went through 3 mice in the last year, looking for one that worked for me. For some reason, I’ve had bad luck with using wireless mice on my Dell Latitude (jittery movement). To make a long story short, I ended up with a wired USB mouse from Microsoft [Amazon link].

If you have not gone shopping for mice lately, you might want to pay attention to the productivity tools that come with them these days. For example, the 3000 has two features that I find indespensible.

One is a virtual magnifying glass that surrounds the mouse cursor which is activated with the thumb button. Click it once to activate the magnifier. Click it again to deactivate. The size of the magnifier can be adjusted by moving the mouse while holding down the thumb button, and the magnification factor can be adjusted by moving the wheel while holding down the thumb button.

Often overlooked is the wheel button. In other words, pushing down on the wheel is a separate action from spinning the wheel, and it can be assigned its own meaning. The default meaning is to cycle to the next window (similar to using Alt+Tab). All four buttons can be reassigned (although it would be really asking for it to change the left and right buttons, other than to swap them, perhaps). Each button has dozens of alternative choices, including setting the button to any arbitrary keystroke, or launching any particular application (which is configured essentially just like a shortcut).

Read more: Windows, Productivity