I love my Rosewill 8500 wireless mouse from NewEgg.com. I like it so much I bought an extra for work, and one for my desktop machine.

I’ve used the mouse quite a bit over the last three months. Two things have happened since then:

1) I killed the battery that came with the mouse.
2) The scroll wheel started to “jump” down about half a click when I used it.

The latter was a big deal. Sometimes I would scroll down a particularly long Web page and then the screen would move about two paragraphs. This was distracting and I often lost my place.

Even more annoying was that the problem with the scroll wheel didn’t happen all the time. At first it was every one out of ten spins. Then it was one in four. Then it was a 50/50 crap shoot for random scrolling insanity.

The Rosewill 8500 comes with a 30 day replacement guarantee from NewEgg, and then a year warranty from Rosewill. I didn’t want to mail in my $30 mouse and then be charged for a repair, so I decided to crack open the mouse myself to see what I could do.

If I succeeded, I’d have my favorite mouse back. If I failed, I had several others to replace it — and it’d make for an interesting Gibberish entry.
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Touchpads or multi-points are okay for navigating your laptop’s screen in a pinch, but any serious use is made easier by a mouse. My friend Bond uses a Logitech VX Nano wireless mouse, and it is really well made. However, it’s about $50 – $60 and getting harder to find as new Logitech models are hitting the streets. Since I’d need to buy two mice, I needed something that was both inexpensive and reliable.

As usual, I turned to NewEgg.com and started browsing.
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I picked up an Acer Aspire 5740 laptop a few weeks ago. Thanks to the forums over at Ars Technica I considered purchasing a Solid State Drive (SSD) to replace the traditional hard drive. Based on their recommendations, I picked up the Intel G2 X25M 80GB Mainstream SSD. The sale price was $220, down from the suggested retail of around $280.

Installation was very easy, and I put a fresh copy of Windows 7 on. Installation time was pretty fast. I got the impression that the SSD was faster overall, but was it worth $220 and 1/4th the storage capacity of my stock 5400rpm laptop drive?

Overall, life with the SSD was faster. I was interested in increasing my battery life, and decreasing my startup and resume times. I didn’t really care too much about faster reading and writing speeds, except how it related to opening programs and waking my computer up from sleep.

Benchmarks for SSDs concentrate on raw disk performance, but I didn’t really care about that. What was the impact of an SSD for a casual, daily laptop user?
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I’ll be honest. I had laptop envy. It struck me pretty hard over the winter holiday, wherein my friends and family spent time cruising the Internet and doing work while all sitting within thirty feet of each other. I retreated up to my office to dink around on my workstation, labeling me both as anti-social and a gaming dork.

There was a problem with joining their mobile computing ranks, however. At the end of 2009 I bought a sweet Lenovo G450 laptop on sale for about 60% off the original price. It was equipped with an Intel dual core processor, 3GB of RAM, and had everything necessary for daily computing. It could play high definition video, had a built-in Web cam for Skyping, and plenty of output ports. I liked it so much I wanted to buy another one.

The issue was that Lenovo (and just about every laptop manufacturer, apparently), was about to transition to Intel’s new mobile processor architecture. That meant the dual core laptops were undergoing deep discounts, and that remaining stock (namely the then-top-of-the-line Core2Duo) was at full price. I waited a few months, checking deal sites and our employee purchase program discounts, but never found a comparable deal.

I resigned myself to waiting for the i3, i5 and i7 machines to come to market, get some age, and then lower in price as the second-generation of ix came to market. Essentially, I was going to have to wait for two generations to pass me by.

That is, until I saw the Acer Aspire AS 5740 i5 laptop on sale at Costco for $599.99.
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