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Are all mice compatible with Macs?

M

macjay

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 3, 2003
366
0
Hi,

I once bought a Targus mini mouse for my iBook and noticed that whenever I woke the iBook from sleep I would have to unplug the mouse then plug it in again to get it to work. When I played with a third party Macally mouse at a store I noticed it didn't do that and whenever the Mac Mini that it was attached to woke from sleep the mouse functioned fine.

How do I know when I buy a mouse whether it will be fully compatible with a Mac? Is it a question of drivers, etc.?

Thanks.
 
i think its some kind of issue that the iBook is forgetting that it had a peripheral attached to it when it wakes up from sleep. taht would be quite annoying....
 
Any mouse will work, but for full functionality I would reccommend a Kensington, Logitec, or some other brand that actually provides mac drivers. My parents got a cheap Microsoft mouse/keyboard setup for their macbook and it really sucks sometimes. I don't know what they were thinking!:confused:
 
I love Microsoft Mice I'm using the MS Comfort Optical Mouse 3000 at the moment, but installing the drivers for it caused lots of problems so I'm just using the built in Apple ones which are fine.
 
i am also using a microsoft mouse, an dit works great didn t have to install anything at all just plug-in and play, ($9.99 at best buy)
 
Eraserhead said:
I love Microsoft Mice I'm using the MS Comfort Optical Mouse 3000 at the moment, but installing the drivers for it caused lots of problems so I'm just using the built in Apple ones which are fine.
Click to expand...

Agreed, Microsoft can really make good mice, hardware-wise. Serious problems with the drivers though.

I made the mistake of installing drivers when I'd just switched from Windows. If I just had tested the mouse without drivers first, I would have discovered that OS X supported all buttons etc. automatically and saved myself a whole lot of trouble. But well, how was I to know? In Windows, the same mouse required drivers in order to allow mapping of buttons to actions...

My favourite mouse, the Intellimouse Optical may be a bit dated but is dirt cheap nowadays, and I really like the symmetry. It works just as fine with the left hand as the right one.
 
try steermouse or usb overdrive. some mice just won't entirely work with native drivers (if they even exist) or those two though...like my razer copperhead, some of the side buttons can't be configured in macosx.
 
macjay said:
Hi,

I once bought a Targus mini mouse for my iBook and noticed that whenever I woke the iBook from sleep I would have to unplug the mouse then plug it in again to get it to work. When I played with a third party Macally mouse at a store I noticed it didn't do that and whenever the Mac Mini that it was attached to woke from sleep the mouse functioned fine.

How do I know when I buy a mouse whether it will be fully compatible with a Mac? Is it a question of drivers, etc.?

Thanks.
Click to expand...

At school I sometimes use one of the Apple Pro mice in the lab with my PowerBook. Sometimes it takes it around 30 seconds to detect the mouse after I woke it up... the mouse would light up up on the bottom, but it produced no response in the meantime. My PowerBook is getting pretty slow, and if MS Word was open when I put it to sleep it took the longest.

If I did unplug it and plug it back in, the computer would detect it right away (or at least faster). I'm not sure why.

Point being, maybe you should wait a little bit for the mouse to be detected, especially if you have a slow(er) computer.
 
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