I looked on the web and checked out reviews on mice and then start reading about the combination of mice and mousepads (albeit probably 3 years later than everyone else ……) and how critical the combination could be.



Now that I'm a little older and the “buy cheap, buy twice” policy makes so much sense, I came to the conclusion that I wanted the best mouse and the best mouse mat.

This brought me to two items

1) Logitech G5 Laser Mouse

2) SteelSeries Mousepad 4S (Rigid metal mouse pad with chemical etched matt black surface)

I nearly bit the hand off the delivery guy on the morning they were delivered, frantically unwrapping them like it was my 10th Birthday – looking good, opened the Steelpad 4S Steel first and saw the matt black, almost stealth looking mousepad. Great. Then opened the Logitech box and had a look at the G5 Laser mouse. Very impressed.

I plugged the mouse in and loaded the software ……

First impressions of the G5

1) It looked good. Felt great.

2) I didn't like the wheel (it provided a lot more resistance than the Microsoft Optical mouse – it wasn't as free wheeling)

I messed around with the weights and decided that it wasn't for me so I put the Logitech G5 Laser mouse back in its packaging and contacted the supplier for a RMA number. Very disappointed indeed!

NOTE: READ THE REST OF THE REVIEW AND SEE HOW MY MIND CHANGED

Next for the Steelpad 4S Steel

Now this looked good, felt good and best of all, it performed. Using my Microsoft optical mouse on it worked great - however it seemed to have quite a bit of noise and friction. I fitted some pad surfers (a strip of self-adhesive low friction material that is supplied with the steel pad) cut them to size and stuck them to the feet of the mouse.

Much better.

A week passed and I'd not had a chance to send the G5 back - for some reason I thought I'd give it another try. I don't know why I did this, however I'd kept on reading great reviews and thought I must be doing something wrong here.

I got it setup as before and initially it felt better on the 4S Steel surface than the optical. After an hour of me saying that the scroll wheel was too hard to move I started to get used to it. I also changed the buttons so that the ‘+' button was (Ctrl+Enter), as I use Opera browser - this is useful for wand commands and the ‘-‘ button to switched between the current and last page open in Opera (Ctrl+Tab). Which, if you're comparing two web pages can be really useful.

I used the left and right on the scroll wheel to act as middle button so that it would open up the selected link in the background. Again a very useful tool.

It was starting to grow on me. The final straw was that I had an identical MS Optical mouse on another pc in another room in the house and once I used it – it felt so cheap and the scroll wheel actually felt like it didn't have enough resistance!

A week or so passed and I started to get irritated with the scraping noise of the G5 Laser Mouse on the Steelpad 4S Steel so I ordered some, specially designed, G5 pad-surfers from Steelpad. This seemed to do the trick and I carefully removed the original ones from the G5. Much quieter – or at least it seemed. A week later I was getting frustrated with the noise again and the scraping feeling (cue the fingernails on chalkboard noise) – I'd had enough.

As I really liked Steelpad's presentation and performance, but not the noise – I went back and ordered the Steelseries 5L cloth and plastic mouse mat. Wow, instant noise reduction, nice padded feeling (not too soft – just right) and it was a little bigger.

I now have the best combination of all now. The best mouse and it's tied in with the best mouse-pad (well, in my opinion anyhow).

If you want a great combination don't bother with the 4S, get the 5L and the Logitech G5 laser – there's no beating this combination!