Help with optical mousepads

[Jeraden]

About 6 months ago I got a cheap mousepad from costco that said it was specifically designed for optical mice. Well, the thing sucked pretty bad, the mouse wouldn't track smoothly across the surface and would jump a lot. I figured it was just a crappy mousepad and went back to my trusty free large cloth mousepad I got like 5 years ago free with an order from buy.com ("Size Does Matter" if anyone got one of those and knows what I'm talking about).

Well, something possessed me to try another one out. I got this one called an X-Trac Zoom pad. I even did research and it got good reviews everywhere pretty much. So I try it out, and same thing. The mouse tends to jump around a bit from time to time, something I never experience with my normal mouse pad or even here at work when I just use the optical mouse on my desk with no mouse pad at all. Its nice in that its nice and slick and doesn't give any resistance, but it just doesn't move the mouse pointer around reliably.

I have a Logitech MX500, while not a gaming mouse, its not a cheap entry-level optical mouse either. So whats going on? Do all these optical mouse pads do this or is my mouse just a freak or what?

 

[Matthias99]

Newer optical mice don't need special mousepads. Maybe you're buying reflective pads for older optical mice (never heard of the "X-Trac Zoom")? Shiny/reflective/transparent surfaces don't work well with modern optical mice, since they interfere with the sensors.

But I don't know why anyone would be selling the old-style ones these days. They're probably just selling some random mouse pad and saying it's "designed for optical mice", which is pretty much total BS.

 

[So]

Once again, I agree with Matthias. I have beeun using an optical since 1999 and I have never bothere with any mousepad at all. Unless your mous skips, just keep it on the desk.