I’ve never met a Logitech driver that I liked.
Show me someone who likes a Logitech mouse and I’ll show you someone who hasn’t installed their drivers.
I just bought an MX610 cordless mouse to replace my dead MX700. It’s not rechargeable, but it’s got a new feature that turns the mouse off automatically when the computer turns off or goes into standby. I guess this isn’t good for those folks who leave their computers on all the time, but I turn mine off every night.
The mouse was working fine with the default Windows XP mouse driver, but I figured I’d give the Logitech SetPoint 2.47 drivers a spin and play with the extra buttons. Let me tell ya, it’s not worth it. For one thing, the new Email and IM buttons indicators only work with a short list of apps and that list doesn’t Thunderbird or Trillian. You can’t even remap those particular buttons to do something else. Frankly, the alert notifications are just a gimmick, anyway. Looking at my monitor is all the indication I need.
I ran into another problem with focus issues whenever the SetPoint service is running. Whichever window I have open loses and regains focus every few seconds. Not exactly conducive to typing a blog post, not to mention the irritation from seeing the title bar flash every time the state changes. Reading through the Logitech forums, it sounds like there may be some external app conflict, but there’s no clear indication on what it is and it’s certainly not worth the time to try and troubleshoot.
Another problem is that the mouse wheel click defaulted to zooming, not auto-scrolling. I use middle-clicking all the time, especially in Firefox and to the credit of the software, this is easily customized in the settings.
I ended up uninstalling the drivers and I’m much happier with the mouse. The only things I’ve lost are the mute button and the Tilt Wheel (left and right scrolling) which all the new-fangled mice adopting. Middle-click plus left/right drag works fine, so that’s not even a big loss.
All in all, I give the hardware an 8/10 on my purely subjective hardware evaluation scale. The responsiveness is good, as well as the auto-off functionality. Though the mouse uses 2.4 GHz, I haven’t seen any conflict. I don’t know how well it will work in games, but if the experience in Windows is any indication, it should be fine. As for the software, I’ll give it a 3/10 for it’s general customizability.
If you don’t need the “advanced” functions available in the software, I recommend this mouse.
Update – 3/14/2006 - Adam Vandenberg commented about “uberOptions” for SetPoint. This provides the sorely missing button customizations that Logitech’s own drivers don’t provide.
I’m still not going to install the SetPoint drivers due to the window focus problem which was significantly more irritating, but if you’re running the Logitech drivers it’s sure worth a look.