I have a Dell Insipron 8600 laptop with built-in Bluetooth support. The touchpad is not bad, but when I’m doing heavy work in MindManager I am moving the cursor around a lot. I wanted a mouse I could take with me to meetings and the road…
For a while I carried around a tiny USB mouse someone had given me as swag but it was corded and the wire was always in the way. Then I bought a Microsoft Wireless Notebook Optical Mouse and used it for a few weeks. Better; but it’s wireless mechanism is proprietary and required me to plug a little USB dongle antenna into the laptop. A pain in the butt, especially given the laptop has built in Bluetooth support and I knew there were Bluetooth mice out there.
However, the Microsoft and Logtitech BT mice I had seen were all “full size”. I wanted something small like the cheapo tiny USB mouse I had. A quick MSN Search query for “Bluetooth mini mouse” pointed me at a few options; I took a chance and ordered a Bluetake BT500 mouse from www.radtech.com.
I received the mouse on Monday and had no trouble getting it setup even though the instructions that came with it were for the Mac. Sadly there were no Windows specific instructions included, although I did find a doc on the Bluetake site that might have been helpful if I actually needed help.
The Dell/XP Bluetooth tools seemed to “just work”. The mouse is responsive, smooth, and feels good in my hand even though it’s tiny. The scroll wheel is a bit jerky and sometimes takes 1/2 a roll or so to “engage” and actually make something happen. But I consider that minor.
One problem that I did encounter was every time I turned off the mouse, suspended my laptop, or restarted it, I would have to “re join” the mouse via the Bluetooth wizard in XP. I finally figured out that I needed to go to the Bluetooth Configuration control panel applet (not the task bar thing that Dell put on the machine) and add the BT500 device to the list of “Devices allowed to discover this computer” as shown below.
Now the mouse and PC talk together automatically every time. Apparently the batteries on this little guy will last 4 or more weeks. If I find otherwise I’ll post a followup, but for now I think this is a really great device.
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Hey Charlie – 1st off, and a little OT, thanks for turning me towards Mind Manager – the product is a lot more compatible with the way my mind thinks – I especially like the auto tree rebalancing that used to be a real manual pain in One-note.
Back to the subject – how does the mouse switch off and on? Is it just an auto-sense thang?
If battery life works out – I may be tempted to buy one to go w/ my new M2 Tecra.
The mouse has a little switch on the bottom.
Damn – I’ve gotta get one. I’ve wrestled with the MS wireless USB widget one too many times.
I have started using ActiveWords more and more as a way to avoid mouse use altogether. AW makes it very easy to create keyboard shortcuts to do just about anything you might want to do with a mouse (except navigate around a particular interface).
AW has come out with an InkPad for tablet pcs. I use it on my Toshiba Portege M200 tablet pc and it makes it much easier to go from program to program. They are just about to release a gesture-driven version for tablets so there will be no need for opening an InkPad.
How do you get the bt drivers installed on XP that give you that "Bluetooth Configuration" window?
I have a "Bluetooth Devices" cp applet and not the other one… I found some drivers that look like that, but it doesn’t seem to want to take control of the bt stack and hence will not work.
HELP!
Josh