Microsoft Wireless Desktop Elite
We simply call it“Mousewheel
Doohickey Version 2.0”Stylish in grey and black, the Wireless
Desktop Elite delivers reliable wireless
performance, but not a whole lot else.I
f you’re like most
mouse/keyboard
users, you’re still
using the crap $4
Mitsumi input devices that
came with your rig when you
bought it. This is appalling—especially
when you consider that the mouse and
keyboard are your primary control-
lers for almost all PC games. A good
keyboard will sit relatively unnoticed on
your desktop for years, but a bad one can
cripple you, leaving you unable to type. A
bad mouse will do worse than that: It will
get you killed in an online deathmatch.
Will Microsoft’s new Wireless Desktop
Elite mouse/keyboard combo hinder your
gaming experience, or elevate it? That’s
the first question we wanted answered.
A gaming mouse should do three
things well. Its tracking should be abso-
lutely precise. Its response should be fast
enough for the twitchiest gamer. And it
should be comfortable enough for mara-
thon gaming sessions. The Elite mouse
fulfills all three criteria, even if it’s sparse
on extras. The mouse does one-up the
conventional scroll wheel with a scroll
wheel that’s tiltable. This means that in
addition to traditional vertical scrolling,
the new wheel also tilts from side to side.
At this point in computing history, we
don’t see a lot of use for the tilting scroll
wheel, but the functionality could poten-
tially enhance certain game genres, once
it’s supported. For example, the horizon-
tal scrolling feature would be great for
selecting inventory items or leaning left
and right.
The Elite keyboard offers the standard
104 keys, plus 25 shortcut keys. While the
25 oddball keys come pre-programmed to
do things such as launch Windows Media
Player and Windows Messenger, most
of them can be reprogrammed to open
applications or web pages of your choos-
ing. Unfortunately, these keys cannot be
reprogrammed to execute any other func-
tion. On the plus side, the keyboard also
includes a tilting-scroll wheel—on its left
side—so you can scroll around documents
without taking your hands off the keys.
Now that’s nice.
We’re still annoyed by the Function
Lock “feature” that new Logitech and
Microsoft keyboards support. When
using these new keyboards, the function
keys default to common Windows tasks,
instead of all the F1 through F12 func-
tions we’ve come to depend on in our
favorite apps. This is great for using OS
features, but if you’d rather have all the
familiar functionality in your games and
programs, you need to press the
F-lock key every single time you reboot.
This really soured our experience with the
Elite keyboard.
Many wireless keyboards and mice
have lower sampling rates than their teth-
ered brethren, but we couldn’t distinguish
this wireless mouse/keyboard combo from
all our wired input devices, even during
gaming. Nonetheless, this wireless combo
doesn’t use rechargeable batteries (unfor-
givable), and, in total, we found it to be a
lackluster package.
—WILL SMITH'ood response. The scroll wheel on the keyboard
rocks.GUGLIELMO MARCONIALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL
.o rechargeable batteries ,imited key program-
ming options. &unction lock sucks.
$120, http://www.microsoft.com/hardwareMAXIMUMPC VERDICT 7