Kensington Expert Mouse - Wired Ergonomic TrackBall Mouse for PC, Mac and Windows with Scroll Ring, Ambidextrous Design and Optical Tracking - Grey (64325)

AMENDED - I GOT THE RIGHT SOFTWARE, SET IT UP, REBOOTED AND IT STILL WORKS - OH FRABJOUS DAY... BUT YOU HAVE TO RUN IT MANUALLY AT STARTUP - ROYAL PITA! Generally I only use the lower buttons, uppers are set at double click & back, so used to control click / open from Mac Contextual Menu. MAYBE it's just me, but for an optical device it can stick after cleaning; polish the ball carefully afterwards. I LOVE Kensington products. BUT since the end of software on a disk, it's tricksy. I downloaded & installed the software for my all in one printer no problems, but this! I made one last try as I was getting sick of only 2 functional buttons. IT HELPS IF YOU HAVE ANOTHER POINTING DEVICE AS A BACKUP!!!!!!! I have a cheap wired trackpad, PITA to use but works. 1: goto KENSINGTON site. 2: find EXACT picture of device, select. 3: scroll down to downloads, you want KENSINGTONWORKS - NOT TrackballWorks - check INSTALLATION NOTES that it has the driver for the EXACT device. 4: download, launch from start menu. 5: play with the settings - there are TONS of them, keep fine tuning until it's right for you. 6: if you're still not happy you are a bigger PITA than me - well done you! I have rechecked EVERY setting I can find - Oh how I miss Apple Macs (but TOO expensive and poncy these days) - as far as I can tell, my system is STILL recognising it only as a "Kensington Expert Mouse". BUT the software works now so who cares if the PC calls my Trackball "Felicity Bumsquash". Trackball Works DID NOT detect my trackball, Kensingtonworks does; also does not crash the computer like TW. I know, i'm demanding. WHY Kensington do not just ship with the software on a USB stick is beyond me. Or even a DVD - it costs around £30 to buy a DVD-RW drive AND you can play CDs and DVDs AND burn CDs & DVDs! Showing my age I suppose. I remember my first home computer - Sinclair QL128 (Kb) with MICRO drives on a portable telly! Hours of fun waiting for programs to load; then crash ... repeat until the drive cartridges broke - happy days! Then Atari ST 520, 2, 4 with Disk drives and WINCHESTER drives as an expensive optional extra... PC, Macs, Android and back to PC. ANYTHING but Uni mainframe terminals! ALSO, I recommend >>>Kensington Mouse Mat with Wrist Support - Ergonomic Duo Gel mouse mat, compatible with laser and optical mice for comfort when at computer, laptop, office, PC, gaming - Red/Black (62402).<<< WITH an extra mouse mat wrist rest if you lean your elbows over the table, not freeishly hovering. Essentially you need around 4 inches of support to use this device, go by the supplied one as a guide - but it hurts (me anyway) to use it. Not that colour particularly, but it has plenty of space for the device and, for me sits above another mouse mat wrist rest so is MEGA comfortable. The one supplied just does not cut it. All in all I am satisfied NOW that I spent £80 for a trackball. I had a non optical one on Macs, wasn't around when I had my previous PC; now there's no mucking around with alcohol, Q Tips and tweezers trying to clean the rollers. Minivac and a screwriver if it got too bad. Just wipe the ball and innersocket. They are different, expensive, but so much easier and actually reduce wrist stress especially combined with an ergonomic keyboard. GREAT for arthritis / rheumatism / nerve damage (i'm dyspraxic, nature of the beast). Oh and finally I found the scroll wheel - it's a flipping dial - it's a ring surrounding the ball - PITA to avoid pressing a button! slight ridging so easy to find by touch and use. BUT you CAN adjust it in the Kensingtonworks settings too!!!!!!! Yes I do love playing around with settings, 50 something going on 5 with technology.

I am a programmer, and spend a lot of time in front of computers: I generally use a computer for 7 hours each day at work, and also use one a lot in the evenings at home too. For the past few years I have been experiencing muscle twitches and spasms in my arms and hands, especially in periods where I have spent extra time on the computer. A while back I decided to buy a trackball, and bought a Logitech thumb trackball. I really liked it, but after a while some of the buttons stopped working properly, and I also found it difficult to move the ball forwards and backwards with the same speed and accuracy as I could move it side to side. A few months ago, I bought one of these trackballs to use at work, and I absolutely love it! I find it so much easier to use than the thumb trackball, and I find it easy to use with my left and right hand, which means that I can switch hands when I get twitches or pains. A week after buying this I bought another one to use at home so now I own 2! A lot of people have complained about the scroll wheel feeling cheap and scratchy, and I even read somewhere that it feels like it has sand inside it! This is definitely true when you first buy the unit, and it still does feel like that to some extent, but the action of the scroll wheel gets better and better as you use it and feels much more fluid. I have used this trackball with both Linux (Ubuntu) and Max OSX and it works fine with both of them. The (unofficial) Ubuntu driver is brilliant, as I can set one of the buttons to be a scroll button. If I tap it, I have set it to navigate backwards, but if I hold it down then the main ball works like a scroll wheel which is really smooth. Unfortunately you can't do this with the Mac driver and I don't know if this is possible on Windows. Overall this is the best 'mouse' I have ever owned for general usage (I have a regular mouse for gaming still), and takes up a lot less space on my desk than a regular mouse as I don't have to move it around. I don't think this has cured my RSI on its own, but it definitely helps as I can switch back and forth between this, my thumb trackball and a normal mouse depending on the state of my hands. I 100% prefer this to a thumb trackball. Edit: 5 Years later this thing is still going perfectly. The mouse wheel is smooth, I get less weird muscle twitches in my thumb and it's a joy to use. I definitely recommend this.

UPDATE 24 FEB 2011 Here is an update to my original review. I just as keen on this excellent input device as I was a year ago when I bought it. It has been in constant use and it really is imho the best input device I have ever used. I use it for graphics, mostly in Adobe Illustrator for example and there is so much control and it is precise. Equally it can go very quickly across screens so I can get across my two screens easily. I also use it for editing video in Final Cut Pro and here, it is really superb. It's great big trackball makes it very easy to just creep forward and back a frame at a time. I really do think that people may overlook this terrific input device because it is not slick and cool, but it is very much the best possible thing for the job. My only comment that could be negative, but isn't, is that using it exclusively may risk RSI problems with you shoulder. I think this is true of any mouse of this sort. That is why I also use the Contour RollerMouse Free. This I use for scrolling around word processing documents and that kind of thing. ORIGINAL REVIEW MARCH 2010 I bought mine on 30 January so I've had it for six weeks now. I absolutely love it! I do not use it exclusively, I use it in conjunction with a Contour RollerMouse Free. However I use the Kensington Expert Mouse for graphics. I recently just finished doing a lot of editing of a video with Final Cut Express and the Expert Mouse is superb for this kind of thing. Many years ago I used a Kensington trackball, I think in about 1995, and I really like that one, but this is so much better because it has such a large trackball. The negative things about this trackball are that it feels a bit cheap in construction compared with say, a Logitech or Microsoft mouse at this price, however I think it is well constructed nevertheless. It looks rather 70s to me but I don't mind this. In actual use the feel is very good. The scroll wheel bearing surface is noisy in a plasticy way but there is no problem with this in use. From time to time it is a good idea to remove a build up of gunge on the three little ball bearings. I keep an old toothbrush nearby for this purpose. It's also quite good to take the ball out and polish it, perhaps with your shirt :) Any of these small negatives are hugely outweighed by the fact that the level of control over the cursor is superb. That is what an input device like this is for and that is what it does so well. Before I got this I tried the most expensive Logitech mouse, however the software for that on my Mac was a disaster so I had to send it back. IMHO the Kensington Expert Mouse is a far better buy than that more expensive Logitech mouse. The level of control over the cursor is much better. The software for the Kensington Expert Mouse works very well indeed on my Mac. I use it with the default settings and it is fine. The scroll direction can be switched with a menu in the menu bar at the top of the Mac OS screen and this is very handy. If you buy this you will be initially disappointed when you take it out of the packaging. You will think it is a prop from the Star Wars movie. When you first use it you will think it is a bit weird if you have not used a trackball before. You will still be having doubts. After a week of using it you will never want to use a "normal" mouse again!

The Good: I had problems with my normal mouse, as I do a lot of photo editing in Lightroom, which entails prolonged periods of clicking on sliders, and the need to keep my finger pressed down while I move sliders for the best effect - this was not going to do my finger any good, and it was uncomfortable. The Kensington Expert Mouse has changed that, and to move the sliders I just need to press my thumb down lightly on the bottom left (left click) button, and move the large trackball with my finger or fingers (the bottom left button is right click). Even after a long session my hand feels relaxed, and I can therefore use the mouse with much more control - I mean, you would soon get writers cramp if you had to hold a pen tightly, and wouldn't be able to write very well - a relaxed hand makes so much difference. I read that the scroll wheel feels and sounds rough and scratchy, and this is true, although it's not that bad and worth putting up with. I also use the scroll wheel in Lightroom to re-size the brushes and spotting tool etc.,which is useful. It also seems to be pretty accurate when masking with the editing brush, and again a relaxed hand helps a lot - I don't know if I will need a tablet and pen for photo editing when I start using Photoshop, but this might possibly do the trick. The gel wrist pad has had mixed reviews, but I find it comfortable, and my wrist is in a straight position. To be honest I was surprised that there was almost no learning curve, and my Apple Magic Mouse was put away in cupboard within 5 minutes. The trackball is very smooth, and the cursor shoots around the screen very quickly and accurately. The Bad: I wasn't interested in the software that allows you to personalise the 4 buttons (left & right click + scroll wheel is all I need). But I read on the internet that the top 2 buttons have a default use, and just wanted to know if that was correct. I downloaded the manual from kensington.com, but strangely there was no information about the thing works. So I decided to email customer services (they need to rename that department!) and the website directs you to register first - but after that you go to a screen that just asks you to register for product updates, then takes you in a circle. I managed to get the email address of another Kensington department, but a series of emails just left me pulling my hair out, as they just told me to go to the site again, even though I told them there is no link, and then they gave me another link which did not work. I then managed to contact the UK customer services by telephone, and was advised to just try the top 2 buttons and see what happens! They did not know how I could contact customer services by email either, and didn't know much about the product - they did saw however, that the Kensington mouse I purchased from Amazon (after I gave the product number) was an old Kensington Expert product that came out in 2007, and that the product on their website is up to date (it seems to work ok though, but wonder if the newer product direct from them will work better with the software for those who want to re-assign the buttons? All being said though, I am very happy with the product. I complained to the UK office about the lack of very basic product information, and the problem in contacting customer services, and they sent my concerns to the USA by email, with a copy to me, so at least someone at Kensington has taken ownership of this problem

After having used the left/right-handed Logitech Marble Mouse pretty happily for six years why has this monster just become my new best friend? The snooker sized ball is massive and comfortable. It sits very well right next to the keyboard, the wrist rest encourages a very natural and ergonomic sitting position. The Logitech's design always had me wanting to be able to incline it sideways off the desk at an angle. Most of Logitech's right-handed-only models do cradle the hand at a slight angle. The ambidextrous model however doesn't. Presumably this is so they can flog more of these units to both left and right handers rather than simply make just ONE of their products for lefties, ok, rant over. The Kensington's large ball allows you to alter the angle at which your hand sits, as a far larger area of your fingers makes contact with the ball. A lot of other reviewers of this product on other sites say a great deal about the hardware so there's no point re-hashing that here other than to agree it does feel a bit on the cheap and plasticy side, but that said personally, I'd much rather something that's well made and works well than something that just looks good. The hardware is however only part of the story. It's the software that comes bundled with this that really makes the difference. You can easily program each of the 4 buttons and assign functions both the top two buttons and the bottom two buttons being pressed simultaneously too which effectively increases the number of buttons to six. The functions you can ascribe these buttons is extremely impressive, things I'd never have thought of as mouse functions. One click can bring up a really nifty `alt-tab' alternative. You can program any button to emulate any keyboard presses, so anything from entering a string of text to say Windows-D-ing or Windows-E-ing. You can even create your own right click menus. The mouse buttons can also be told to function differently within different programs. I've only just started using this but I knew in an instant that this is a really nice bit of kit.

I've had this rollerball for a couple of months now. I've used it for work and at home. I orginally bought this device because I was getting wrist pain working for 8 hours at an office computer monday to friday. I can say after switching away from the traditional mouse has cleared that wrist pain right up. About the product itself, I enjoy the size of of the ball, buttons are in the right place and feel sturdy. It came with a detachable wrist-rest too which is a must have in my opinion, without it the ball and buttons seem too high from the desk. The accuracy of the mouse control with the device is excellent, takes some getting used to compared to the traditional mouse but after a while its fine. It does feel a little slower than using a normal mouse however, and that is fine for work related tasks, but a certainly would not be playing any video games with it. I don't imagine that is its intended use anyway either. The software the device comes with is great too. Very customizable, you can adjust settings regarding how the mouse behaves in relation to the ball's movement, things like speed, sensitivity etc. It has four buttons which are fully customizable with a wide array of options too via the software. If you've read this far then you'll probably be wondering whats the catch. Whilst everything else on this product seems top quality the biggest let down, as other reviewers have said too, is the scroll wheel. I honestly don't know how it got past kensington's quality testing because it is downright glaringly awful. You do get used to it after a while, such that it isn't really as big an issue, but in the context of reviewing the product it really needs to be said. The scroll wheel is grindy and stiff. When you rotate it, you can hear the scrapping of plastic as it rotates, its not a smooth experience. I actually open the product up and used plastic-friendly silicone lubricant to try and loosen it up. I checked to see if there was any screw tightnesses which may be causing the problem too but it hasn't helped that much. On further inspection the scroll wheel sits on top of three small plastic ball-bearings. Taking the scroll wheel housing out of the device does make it rotate more freely but when you reassemble the product, the stiffness returns. Its definately some kind of design flaw with the plastic rotation mechanism. Overall I'd still recommend the product. Whilst the scroll-wheel is a big let down, everything else is more or less perfect. I hope Kensington do revise this product in future though and address the mechanical flaws.

Forget about anything you read saying this is not compatable with Win 7. If what you want is a BIG trackball mouse, hardwearing and easy to use, this is for you. This purchase was to get a stand by for another I have been putting to hard use over the last few years, only one problem my (wicked) step dad has taken it for himself as it's better than anything he has tried. Ok the lubricant on the bearings were a little stiff when first put to use but that quickly 'breaks down' and gives a smooth action. The ecroll wheeel is very easy to use and you have the right and left click buttons. Here is where the problem appears to start for some users as on earlier OS you can configure the 4 buttons to do what you like (within reason) but unfortunately the software wasn't/isn't compatable with Win 7 64bit but you still get a 2 button mouse, which most users want. It's good for anyone who finds the smaller mice of today a problem and is leaps ahead of Kensingtons other (smaller) trackball. Although not as cheap as some, as I've already said I've put my old one (which I've now got to get another replacement for) to very hard use over the last few years without any hiccup, unlike some others I've tried. The only thing I've not been able to do is game with it for that you would still need either a standard mouse or a pad.

I like the mouse because it gives you a different approach to working with your hand, especially if you've got carpal syndrome issues. For details like clicking on anchor points in Adobe Illustrator, it can be really frustrating, so I use it more for editing and other work than working in Illustrator or Photoshop. If you try to draw with it, good luck, I couldn't draw anything nice. The mouse itself is quite big (I have small hands) and comes with a pad that I don't like too much so instead of using the pad I use my own mouse pad that has a silicone wrist protector, which is softer. I would recommend buying it, but definitely not for gaming or sorts of work that require fast accuracy. The positive thing about the mouse is that you can program all four buttons around the ball (you can program each button, and define what it does if you click two of them simultaneously too. It is great for browsing the net though because it has a spinning wheel around the ball which works great when you need to scroll a page - you can also zoom in and zoom out using it. I would rather see it it would be flat, but if I compare it to SlimBlade (which I don't have), I think the Expert Kensington with a spinning wheel wins the battle. My wrist definitely feels much better using this mouse and combining the work with a graphic pen and other mouses help a lot. Would recommend the seller!

My opinion is that it would be nice to have a combination of both a traditional mouse and also this one, but i'm more than happy with learning how to use this one like a pro over a period of time. Takes about 10 mins to get the initial hang of it, but after that it's more a matter of fine tuning how you work with it best! (I have the settings so that the cursor moves VERY quickly so it requires a little bit more finesse) but it's just a matter of personal taste. I find it super comfortable to use, and when i have some spare cash, i will buy another one for my other pc. I chose this wired version because i was sick of inconsistencies with my wireless mouse (dropouts occasionally) which is a pain in the ass if you do a lot of dragging and dropping. I've set the top left button to be a 'drag' button... which means you can click it once on the window of choice to move and you won't have to hold it for the duration.... just move it to where you are happy with and single click again to drop it. I recommend this bad boy to people that do a lot of editing. I bought it for music production and i wish i had one earlier, as i didn't realise how much i was fighting with my previous mouse to achieve the same thing in whatever period of time.

This product has found its home in almost every professional recording studio in the world. It is extremely dextrous and such a comfort to the wrist. Long hours at the studio don't seem so long anymore! The only issue I have noticed is with the scroll wheel not performing smoothly, but it still works. The trackball is weighted and has sufficient momentum to sen e cursor flying to the other end of the wide screen display. Integrates very well with Pro Tools, and general workflow. I am yet to try out the customisable top keys to instantiate macros. Very satisfied with the product finish and quality.

Ganska stor, stadig, och exakt. Vilsam att arbeta med. Rekommenderas:)

Me encanta este producto ,me llego antes de lo esperado y muy bien protegido , yo lo elegí por que anteriormente también tenia otro de otra marca el logitech y me gusto mucho .. pero finalmete este es mucho mejor y mas grande , y respecto a las opiniones de la ruedecita de scroll si es verdad que suena un poco bruta , pero a mi ese detalle no me importa, (bastante que se puede hacer) por que en mi caso y en el anterior modelo no podia hacer eso , lo dicho un producto perfecto y en mi caso para la produccion de audio va de lujo con programas como cubase , pro tools etc , Producto que recomiendo si sufres de dedos en resorte !!!!

Trackball nie współpracuje z oprogramowaniem Kensington. Sprawdzałem na 2 komputerach z Windows 10 64bit. Wsparcie producenta praktycznie nie istnieje - na odpowiedź czeka się ponad 2 dni, a uzyskane porady do niczego nie są przydatne. Szkoda, bo sam produkt całkiem fajny.