Logitech V470 Bluetooth Mouse Review

Some time ago I was in Zagreb for a trip. Suddenly, an opportunity to play Starcraft was there, but my mouse was not. That is reason why I decided to go to closest store and buy myself a mouse for laptop. Until this moment, I used my trusty Microsoft’s IntelliMouse Explorer 3.0A for both home computer and laptop. Although it is very comfortable, it wasn’t well suited for use on road.

There were two requirements for new mouse. It needed to be comfortable for big hand and it needed to use bluetooth. It proved that later requirement was rather hard to fulfill. For some reason, all manufacturers like to have their own wireless dongle. Decision to avoid certain loss of that dongle was what kept me of Microsoft Arc Mouse. That mouse looks powerful!

One mouse that looked promising was Logitech’s V470 bluetooth mouse. It’s price was around 50 EUR which is little bit high, but it did looked fine and I did wanted to play Starcraft that night so I bought it.

Everything was packed in that “wonna bet that you cannot open me” plastic bubble but knife sorted that out. Inside of package you get mouse itself, instruction manual wrapped together with installation CD (I never used it - works without any additional drivers - at least on Windows 7), small cloth bag and two Duracell batteries. I was reminded that I need batteries when I saw that they are in package. Thanks Logitech for not going usual “batteries not included” route.

Connecting mouse to computer was painless. Just turn it on, press small connect button on mouse (bottom side) and search for new device on computer. Two of them will start communication and after ten seconds you are ready to use it.

I will not cover technical specifications here, but issue of comfort. Although this mouse is not quite big enough for my hand, it is bigger than those tiny laptop mouses. I had no problems with prolonged usage once I got used to it’s shape. Bluetooth connection has range of few meters - much larger than my arm in any case. Cursor movement is little bit faster than I was used to, but I got re-adjusted quite fast.

I found only one troubling issue. After you don’t move mouse for ten seconds, it goes into sleep mode. Waking is fast, just a fraction of second, but noticeable. You get feeling that mouse is stuttering a bit.

As final conclusion, I must say that this is one mighty mouse. :)

Keyboard

I accidentally “de-enterized” keyboard on my laptop (HP 6730b). Somehow one CD left in my backpack managed to get under my enter key. Plastic beneath could not handle pressure and small piece went off. Although that piece had less than two millimeters in length, my enter key would not stay in it’s place with it missing.

Solution was simple and new keyboard (~40 €) arrived in two weeks (it may seem long, but this is quick for Croatia). Once I decided that I was competent enough to replace it, I took a look at documentation on how to do it.

I was surprised - not only that there was great manual, but there were also videos on how to perform small-scale part replacements.

Keyboard was replaced in less than ten minutes without a hitch. I finally got my enter key back and good feeling about Hewlett-Packard. Although they did nothing other than put some documents on-line, those documents were so good that they made me happy customer.

My next laptop will also be HP.

64-Bit, Where Art Thou

Well, presentation is over. I must confess that it was really strange feeling speaking and not seeing anybody. It is so unnatural.

It wasn’t without hitch (even incorrect code was working by accident) but hopefully it was good enough for everybody listening.

Here are source files used during presentation.

I will give link to presentation recording as soon as it goes up.

TechDays

Tomorrow (2009-04-01) I am giving presentation at TechDays virtual conference. Presentation is titled “64-bit where art thou” and it will be about transition to 64-bit framework and issues that can arise. I will try to keep it low on power point and illustrate all through C#.

Windows 7 on High DPI

For “ages”, monitors had resolution of 96 dpi. Every OS and application was designed with it in mind (usually only tested on that resolution). If you buy LCD screen these days, you will see that everything looks a lot smaller. In order to have fine grained picture, pixel density has gone way up. However, your OS still draws everything like it did for years and your eyes are going mad.

Solution is to change DPI to suit your comfort level (usually 125% (120 dpi) is enough). After restart (log off is enough for Windows 7), everything grows a little bit. Applications that are dpi-aware will scale properly and everything should look fine.

Old applications that are not aware that 96 dpi is out of fashion, will not look so nice. Most common issues will be some controls that went outside of form bounds and text wrapping at weird places. It can happen that just one button you need is unreachable (notice on this picture, there is also cancel button way to the right - outside of window).

In order to solve this issue, Windows Vista will lie to those applications that everything is still in 96 dpi and then manually scale it (Aero is needed - DWM is culprit). Although this will solve problem with unaware applications, it will also make windows blurry (physics of stretching cannot be avoided). This may seem like a pretty good trade until you became aware that application that knew how to scale in Windows XP gets same blurry treatment (e.g. Visual Studio 2008). Windows Vista assumes that all old applications are DPI unaware and it requires application change to behave “just right” (as easiest solution, you can check ignore DPI on compatibility settings).

Reason behind Windows Vista recognizing all old applications as “problematic ones” is that there is new API in place to assure application is capable of scaling. Since that API hasn’t been there before Vista, applications will not call it. If they do not call it, Vista will think that they cannot scale. Solution is to get new version. Depending on application, that can pose a problem (e.g. there isn’t newer version of Visual Studio 2008 - it doesn’t scale even with service pack applied).

This behavior has changed with Windows 7. Microsoft recognized that most of applications know how to scale and even if they cannot, 25% increase (120 dpi is most common) will trim very little of content. Your application will, for all practical purposes, revert to XP high-DPI behavior.

If you decide to go higher than this (e.g. 150%), DWM will kick back in and scaling will take over. Although this will again make windows blurry (for Vista DPI non-aware applications), it will also make everything fit.

Since DPI settings higher than 120 dpi are not so common, I find this a worthy compromise.