How To Spot A Psychopath

I started writing a whole big thing about a Flexiglow “Series Connect” power supply, but there’s not a lot of point to that since I don’t think it’s possible to buy one new any more.

The 500W Series Connect had been sitting on my to-review pile since late 2005. The nice people at Anyware who sent the PSU to me might have been annoyed about that. But it’s now clear to me that they should instead count their blessings that I didn’t get around to looking at it until now.

This power supply turns out to have armour on all of its cables that’s so thick that the main motherboard power lead feels like a garden hose under full mains water pressure.

If your computer layout happens to match where this PSU’s ludicrous cables want to go, it’ll work - though you may find it impossible to put the side back on the computer case.

For almost any other computer, it’s likely to be physically impossible to plug this PSU in, even if you only need a few of its leads.

I managed to get the main motherboard connector to plug in as long as the PSU itself was six inches in position and ninety degrees in orientation from where it was meant to be. Any attempt to move the PSU closer to its proper mounting location threatened to wrench the motherboard socket right off the board.

I then tried just cutting the useless armour off the leads. I’ve got a pipe cutter that made short work of the outer rubber layer. Under that, though, there’s braided shielding, which of course frays all over the place and stabs your fingers and is difficult to cut without cutting the conductors under it and it’s all a horrible schemozzle.

Do PC power leads need braided shielding? Of course they don’t. PC components expect to get a bit of RF noise on their DC input. It’s possible that some marginal (or heavily overclocked) components will work slightly more reliably with slightly less noisy input, or that some cruddy sound card will be a little less noisy that way, but there’s a reason why the ATX12V PSU standard does not require shielding for DC wires.

The standard does, however, prohibit PSUs from sending more than a certain amount of noise down their DC wires, because that noise can easily out-shout - by orders of magnitude - the amount of noise the wires can possibly pick up from the air.

Shielding the wires, in that case, simply ensures that the PSUs own noise remains uncorrupted by noise from elsewhere.

I still needed a PSU to replace a dead one in a home-server box, though, so I made a shortlist of power supplies with enough plugs to support the forest of drives inside the server, then stuck a pin into the list and ordered a Corsair TX750W.

Apparently this PSU actually can deliver 750 watts of power, which is (a) way more than this server will ever need, and (b) quite unusual in the consumer PSU market. “Generic” PSUs usually underperform their stated capacity by a truly shameful margin, and you shouldn’t expect even a brand-name “750W” PSU to be able to deliver more than a constant 600W or so. Some do, but many don’t.

(The TX PSUs are made for Corsair by Channel Well Technology, who make similarly high-spec PSUs for other companies, like Thermaltake.)

This PSU also has far more connectors than the server will need - but it’s got enough drive connectors, which is all I really care about. And it wasn’t much more expensive than a much less capable PSU. And under-loaded PSUs generally live for a very long time, and are likely to be more efficient. So what the heck.

I’m already glad I bought the Corsair, because it gave me such a laugh when I opened the box.

Within the box, and within the foam anti-shock packaging, but outside the final clear-plastic-bag level of packaging, this PSU comes in a fuzzy drawstring bag.

It’s a very cheap fuzzy drawstring bag; thin, with fuzzy pseudo-suede on the outside only, and redolent of the various outgassings of the fresh electronic components that’ve lived within it since the PSU was bagged up at the factory. It’s not nearly in the same class as your traditional Crown Royal dice bag.

But it is, nonetheless, within the definition of the term, a fuzzy drawstring bag.

For a computer power supply.

So, like, if you feel the need to unscrew just the PSU from your computer and carry it around with you, you won’t have to tuck it uncomfortably under your arm or carry it by the ATX cable like a big square dead rat or something.

No, man. Not you. Not the Corsair TX owner.

You can bag that sucker up, man!

And then, if any punk on the street should allege that your rig be insufficiently pimped, you can say to him “Yo, I gots my P-to-the-S-U right here in a bag, bitch! What you got? Well? You got a motherboard hangin’ round yo’ neck that I ain’t noticed? Huh?”

(And yes, I’m pretty sure there’s a factory worker out there who can’t believe he’s making these things. Previously.)

Here in Australia, you can buy your own TX750W from m’verygoodfriends at Aus PC Market for a mere $AU211.20 including delivery anywhere in the country. And you might as well; it looks to me, and to people who bothered to actually test it, as if it’d be a perfectly good piece of hardware for the money, even if you didn’t get a fuzzy drawstring bag into the bargain.

Australian shoppers can click here to order one.

I just watched From Beyond, which Stuart Gordon made a year after the more famous, and similarly Lovecraft… ish… Re-Animator.

(There’s an animated 2006 version of From Beyond, as well, but an IMDB rating of 1.7 doesn’t tempt me.)

The movie didn’t get off to a good start. Every automatic door in a hospital - including the glass swinging doors on the exit - made the Star Trek door noise.

(This movie also turned out to be the source of the “giving them drugs, taking their lives away” sample from Empirion’s acid house classic Narcotic Influence. Which is neither here nor there, but which I found surprising enough that I just had to mention it.)

The acting is also not a good reason to watch this movie. And the script has only the tiniest skerrick of a connection with the original Lovecraft story.

The special effects have their ups and downs, too.

(Actually, this beastie looks pretty good in motion.)

Oh, and then there’s the bondage gear. And the supernaturally-induced horniness. I don’t remember that from the original story either.

But, for all that, I quite liked it.

Like all good horror movies, From Beyond gives you the impression that there’s some method to the madness even if you can’t really figure it out. It also held my interest; there were no long predictable scenes with characters walking backwards into the grasp of a monster or failing to be believed by scornful, obviously doomed townsfolk.

The movie’s also got classic horror stalwart Ken Foree, amiably tolerating a bit of light blaxploitation. And the silly bits of the ending are also the funny bits of the ending, so that’s OK. I’ve watched far worse movies with far better production values.

As Neil Gaiman points out…

…visual media are not a good place to put Cthulhu Mythos stuff, because the whole idea is that the ghastly Things are as beyond human comprehension as Jupiter is beyond the comprehension of an ant. But since this isn’t really a Lovecraft-y story, that doesn’t matter.

The version I watched is the unrated Director’s Cut released only last year, which includes a couple of bits of footage that didn’t make it past the censors when the movie was in theatres. Pay attention and you can spot the places, in a couple of particularly nutritious shots, where the recovered-from-the-cutting-room-floor footage was spliced back in.

Oh, and I made a panorama of the laboratory.

You’re welcome.

The Forged Alliance expansion pack for the CPU-gobbling Real Time Strategy monolith of the moment, Supreme Commander, is rather good.

First up: It’s a stand-alone game. And not a terribly expensive one - sixty Australian bucks delivered from eBay dealers like the one I used, forty US bucks from Amazon).

If you only have Forged Alliance and not the original Supreme Commander (now only $US29 at Amazon!), you can still play multiplayer games against anybody else who has Forged Alliance, with or without SupCom. But the only side available to FA-only players is the new one, the weird alien Seraphim.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. The Seraphim, once you get past the bizarre names and shapes of their units, are actually simpler than the other three sides. They’ve got slightly fewer units available, but what they have combines the features of multiple enemy units.

So, for instance, they’ve got a very annoying “combat scout” unit, which has the wide view and radar coverage of everybody else’s scouts, plus a decent gun (the other scouts either have no gun at all or a gun that does nearly no damage), and an automatic cloak feature that makes the scout almost completely undetectable if it’s told to “hold fire” and doesn’t move.

Forged Alliance’s typically lousy storyline revolves around the Seraphim, whose weirdly-named units all look fantastic (those giant chicken-walkers in the picture above are “Ythothas”. Or possibly Ythothae). Often asymmetric, always shiny, and usually with some parts that just hang there in the air with no connection to the rest of the machine.

This ultra-tech does raise the question of why the Seraphim units are roughly equal in power to those of the three human sides, but the answer to that is of course “because otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a game”.

FA has a short, but rather difficult, single player campaign in which you can play any of the three original sides against the Seraphim. (I, of course, would have rather liked the opportunity to play the Seraphim in the campaign and crush the miserable hominids, but we don’t always get what we want.)

Forged Alliance is not just a unit pack. The whole game’s been dramatically rebalanced, so if you’ve never played SupCom before you may be surprised to find yourself actually winning against someone who’s been playing for months, but is now trying to do the same things they did in the original game.

It is, for instance, no longer economically sound to build vast resource farms full of generators and mass fabricators. Massfabs are much worse value than they used to be, so you can’t just button yourself up in a self-sufficient base and not bother trying to control territory.

And veterancy - units getting tougher as their kill count rises - has been dramatically revamped. You used to practically never see a veteran unit except when something got to shoot at a factory that had a long build queue, so the attacker got credit for a kill every time it blew up the latest 1%-complete unit-in-progress. Now, most units get their first veterancy level - and some more hit points, and slow hit point regeneration - at five or ten kills. Little level 1 units veteranise even faster.

What this means is that, although tech-level-one units are more useful in FA, it’s now a very bad idea to just spam hordes of tech one tanks at the enemy base. The defenders, including the enemy’s all-important Commander, will very rapidly become rather buff at your expense.

(All we need now is Kingdoms-style gold highlights on veteran units!)

People are, of course, still finding things to bitch about, most notably the fact that FA is an even bigger system hog than “vanilla” SupCom, even after you turn off certain features that really pound frame rate down.

Pretty much any dual-core CPU and moderately recent video card is good enough for small multiplayer games of FA at reasonable resolutions (on one or two monitors!), though, so this isn’t a You Must Upgrade Your One-Year-Old Computer game (like, say, Crysis).

I recommend it.

I just installed the brand new v163.71 Nvidia drivers (the last non-beta release was v162.18), and benchmarked Supreme Commander before and after. There’s a small but significant improvement.

I’m tired of seeing articles about AMAZING NEW DRIVER IMPROVEMENTS OMG and then discovering that there’s only any difference if you’re using a GeForce 8800 on Windows Bloody Vista.

I’ve got a 32-bit-WinXP computer with a 2.2GHz (at the moment) dual core Athlon 64 and a 256Mb GeForce 7900 GT.

That’s probably still faster than the average, but it’s pretty far from the current cutting edge. (Only two cores, dahling? However can you cope?)

Driver tweaks aimed at the super-expensive dual-slot super-cards won’t help me at all. I’m guessing that they won’t help most of you, either. Tweaks that help a GeForce 7900 ought to be some use for various other current affordable Nvidia cards, though.

I’ve also got an effing big monitor, so I ran the tests in 2560 by 1600 resolution. That’s practical for fullscreen Supreme Commander if you’ve got some flavour of 8800 (ATI aren’t really in the very-high-end race at the moment), but it’s actually very playable if…

…you split the monitor between the normal view and the easy-to-draw topographic-view map.

Running the standard “perftest” benchmark in that resolution guarantees, despite Core Maximizer, that the game will be video-card-limited most of the time.

The Supreme Commander benchmark reports total frames rendered, “sim” performance (how fast the game calculates everything-but-graphics), “render” performance (graphics alone) and a “composite” score that roughly represents overall performance.

In this graphics-heavy test, my “render” result increased by nineteen per cent with the new drivers. The giant resolution and less-than-incredible video card meant that, in the peculiar jargon of the perftest benchmark, the “render” score only improved from minus 1029 to minus 863. But trust me, that’s still good.

The logged-frames difference was +0.7%, which probably means less than experimental error and definitely means nothing you’d ever notice. The sim score improved only slightly more, at +1.6%. But the composite score improved 4.7%, from 5794 to 6065.

You probably wouldn’t actually notice that in play - it’s a general rule of thumb that differences of less than ten per cent aren’t noticeable. But almost five per cent is not a bad improvement to get for free.

Complex Supreme Commander games are almost 100% CPU limited. Smaller games, though - and even complex games when you can’t see much of the enormous map you’re playing on - don’t give your graphics card much time to breathe, especially if you’ve taken advantage of SupCom’s still-rare ability to make use of a second monitor. So I don’t think I’m lying with statistics, here.

(I’m not, to be fair, actually playing much Supreme Commander at the moment. I got ETQW yesterday, and intend to Strogg 4 Life for a while before getting back to the direction of vast robotic armies.)

Today, I received a press release whose title was “FixMyMovie Launches with James Bond-Style Video Enhancement”.

This did not fill me with joyous anticipation. “Video enhancement” is one of those ridiculous action movie cliches - any old security camera footage can be “enhanced” to hundred-megapixel detail whenever it’s necessary to move the plot along.

FixMyMovie does not, however, actually make such stupid claims. It would, in fact, probably be perfectly useless to James Bond.

What it aims to do is apply MotionDSP processing muscle to low quality video, to make it better looking without losing detail. At the moment you can make a free account on fixmymovie.com and upload any video clip smaller than 352 by 288 pixels in resolution and 20 megabytes in file size, and see what transpires.

So I did.

When I reviewed the Aiptek Pocket DV2 toy digital video camera back in early 2003, I strapped it to the top of a model tank and took it for a drive around a park. The Pocket DV2 produces grainy, fuzzy, nine frame per second 320 by 240 video, which is pretty much on par for cheap phone cameras these days. FixMyMovie is specifically designed to enhance phone camera video, so I figured one of the Aiptek clips would be a good sample.

Here’s a Google Video version of the clip. Video of this quality is one of the few things that GooTube compression won’t make a whole lot worse, but it’s still lost some quality; you can download a DivX-compressed version of the original footage, which looks almost exactly the same as the original Motion JPEG video but is quite a bit smaller, here.

Here’s the FixMyMovie-d version. If you can’t see it, you probably need the latest beta Flash plugin. If you’ve got the right plugin already, you’ve probably noticed that the FixMyMovie player currently has a MySpace-style auto-play function, which you can’t turn off. Sorry about that.

The difference really is quite impressive. FixMyMovie has gotten rid of the prominent blocky compression artefacts in the original video, without noticeably blurring it. It’s not an amazing, incredible, action-movie-bulldust improvement, but it’s very worthwhile. Rapid camera movements - an acknowledged weakness of the enhancing technique - leave noticeable ghosts from previous frames. But they’re only noticeable if you’re trying hard to see something wrong with the video. The improvements far outweigh the problems.

The deal with FixMyMovie - once it leaves its current beta state - is that it’ll only enhance the first ten seconds of any clip for free. If you like the look of it you can “Order” a fully processed version, which will cost money - 99 US cents, to enhance this clip.

(It took quite a long time to process this clip, presumably because people are already hammering the FixMyMovie server. You get an e-mail when processing is finished, though, so you don’t have to sit there refreshing the My Videos page.)

At the moment, you get $US25 credit when you create a free account - and no, you don’t have to give them a credit card number; use a disposable e-mail address if you’re really paranoid. $25 should plenty to try the service out.

The player lets you play the whole clip even when only ten seconds have been enhanced, seamlessly connecting the enhanced beginning to the unprocessed rest of the video. Click the bar on the right-hand side of the video and you can compare processed and unprocessed still frames with a nifty mouse-drag interface.

As the FAQ explains, once you’ve fully processed a video, you can download it in various popular formats, including native h.263-encoded FLV flash video format, for upload to YouTube, which will then not recompress the video.

Here’s the video on YouTube - I only just uploaded it, so it ought to be viewable in a moment. If you can’t be bothered installing the new Flash player, or if it’s not available for the computer you’re using, this is pretty close to the fixmymovie.com version.

Google Video and YouTube still aren’t completely harmonised; you can upload FLV-format video like this to YouTube, but not to Google Video.

The enhanced WMV and MOV versions of this dinky little one-minute clip were fifteen megabytes in size. They’ve got a bit more detail than the online Flash version - they look a bit better than the 7.5Mb FLV-format version too - but they’re not nearly better enough to justify that huge file size.

The FixMyVideo enhancement hasn’t done anything to the frame rate (which is good), but it’s blown the file resolution up to 640 by 480, which along with 64 kilobit per second audio (which the crappy-camera original didn’t have) accounts for the file size inflation.

The smaller FLV-format version is 320 by 240, as it should be, because that’s the native resolution of GooTube.

The big file sizes aren’t really a problem, because this enhancement technique is based around interframe interpolation; it tries to find the same image components in different frames, and overlay them to leave the image data and eliminate various forms of distortion. So it’s kind of like speckle imaging and image stacking, but for motion video. Sticking with the original resolution would have thrown away some of the interpolated detail.

In brief, though: Yes, FixMyMovie works. I don’t know how much value it’ll have for video that looks OK to start with, but if you’ve got some crappy phone, web or toy camera video that you’d like to improve, check FixMyMovie out while it’s still free.

Last night I watched, or at least attempted to watch, an episode of The Human Mind (subtitled “And How To Make The Most Of It”; this debut episode is reviewed here by someone less annoyed than me).

The Human Mind managed the remarkable feat of being staggeringly dumbed down, yet also, frequently, incomprehensible.

Robert Winston’s made some great documentaries, but this sure as hell wasn’t one.

For me, the high point was a guy who can flawlessly remember ten consecutive shuffled packs of cards. We were told that he did so by walking around London, looking at landmarks, associating mental images of things like teddy bears and cakes with suits and numbers, and then associating, say, a teddy bear eating a cake with Tower Bridge in order to be able to remember that this point in his walk was the Jack of Diamonds.

Just do that 519 more times, and you’ve got it!

It’s just that simple!

Yes, that really was all the explanation we got. Perhaps something that’d make sense of it got left on the cutting-room floor.

As it stood, though, I found this part of the show very much like watching Look Around You, but without the humour.

The episode also featured a fireman, whose story was told over about three hours of brightly coloured stock footage of fire and explosions and men with big hoses, without which the audience was presumably expected to go and watch the football instead, or just drool until we all died of dehydration.

This fireman once saved a bunch of other firemen by ordering them to leave a burning building where, a mysterious intuition told him, something awful was about to happen. Which it did.

After eight or nine more hours of stock footage - and interview footage of the fireman, who was interviewed in a slightly smoky room, to make sure we didn’t absent-mindedly start thinking he was a pastrychef - we were told that he’d actually seen very clear evidence that a backdraft situation was developing. And then he just got a bit of a hunch before he added it all up consciously.

This doesn’t sound like a very big deal to me.

But apparently it was worth a third of the episode, all by itself.

Oh, and the beginning of the episode sang the praises of the Durham fish oil trial, in which omega-3 oils apparently made kids smarter.

Except that study is complete bollocks [latest update here!]. There is no reason whatsoever to suppose that fish oil supplementation does anything for brain development in otherwise well-nourished children.

I suppose Winston’s just phoning this one in from the voice-over booth and trousering the proceeds.

You wouldn’t think he’d need the money, but I don’t know why else anyone’d want to put their name on crap like this.

I’ve played enough of Overlord now to get a proper feel for the game (one of the seven bosses dead, three of the four minion colours collected). I am continuing to like it.

The PC control system works pretty well. The console version of the game uses an analogue stick to let you tell your minions where to go, on the occasions when you’re not just saying “go in the direction I’m pointing”, but need to steer them around the map. The PC version lets you do this by holding both mouse buttons and moving the mouse. This usually does not result in half of your minions drowning.

The different flavours of minion are also pretty easy to manage, because the game deliberately limits you to ordering one type around at a time, or telling them all to move at once. I presume they were tempted to include some kind of RTS-type grouping so you could order two or three flavours around in a group; I’m glad they didn’t, if only because that would have further tempted them to make fights you could only win by doing that.

The level design is also good. The levels so far look like the kind of “natural layout” game levels in which you’re forever wandering around places you’ve already been trying to figure out where the hell you need to go next, but they are not in fact that kind of level. Which is good, because there’s no map display.

The level structure - move this to access that, get a shortcut back to the start when you get to the end, all that stuff - is also competently done.

I’ve seen a couple of bugs - the game locked up once, and there’s other occasional oddness like minions that’re carrying something getting stuck on an obstacle even after you’ve removed it. The bugs are easy to work around, though.

Back in the real world, I keep feeling the urge to order our cats to charge out, kill something, and bring back treasure.

The first part’s probably quite doable, but the cats unfortunately do not share my opinions regarding what constitutes “treasure”.

Yes, as I anticipated, Overlord is fun. And it runs fine at decent resolution on my GeForce 7900 GT, once I disabled a couple of pretty-features in the config.

It’s hard not to love a game where you come upon what is obviously Bag End, but cannot be bothered to stoop to enter the silly little round door.

Instead, you just send your minions to bash that door down, flood inside, smash and kill everything in sight, and then bring anything of value out to you.

(Ideally, you’d be picking your nose while you waited for them to return. Perhaps in Overlord II.)

As I’ve mentioned before, ordinary everyday external USB hard disk boxes do not ever tell their drive to go into sleep mode.

How much harm this actually does is questionable, because spinning up hard drives causes motor electronics and bearing wear, just like running the drive all the time. There’s doubtless some point on the duty cycle graph below which using sleep mode does more harm than good.

But since external drives are very seldom the main drive for a computer, they usually don’t need to be spinning for a very large fraction of their lives. So they probably will last quite a lot longer, not to mention use less electricity and make less noise, if they’re spun down when they’re not needed.

But virtually no external boxes have that feature. They use cheap USB-to-ATA bridge hardware that can’t do spin-down at all. There’s no standard way to even send a spin-down message via USB (you can do it via FireWire) - but you could still use extra software, or just a little switch on the box, or something. But nobody does. You have to buy a NAS box if you want a sleep feature, which is overkill if all you need is a plain external drive.

If you want your external hard drive to stop spinning, you’ve got to turn off the box. For a lot of the cheap ones that means unplugging the power. Then the DC lead falls down behind the desk.

M’verygoodfriends at Aus PC Market, though, now have a cheap stopgap solution.

This box comes from international megabrand Noontec/BlueEye, whose Web site is as I write this not responding to hails.

(Readers outside Australia may find the same product being sold under yet another weird name, by a company that may even have a working Web site!)

The box has a few points in its favour.

One: It’s cheap. $AU77 without a drive, including delivery anywhere in Australia.

Two: It accepts SATA drives, up to 500Gb in capacity. No good if you want to use an old PATA drive, but new SATA drives are now often cheaper than new PATA ones.

Three: It turns off when it loses USB signal, either because the host computer has shut down or because its data cable has been unplugged.

The box also has a simple power button on the front. That’d be a selling point all by itself, since it means you don’t have to fumble around the back of the thing to shut it down.

The automatic power-down function is not, regrettably, matched by an automatic power-up function when you turn your computer back on again. You have to power the box up manually. Just poking the power button is not a huge chore, though, and for my money it definitely beats coming back to your computer after a weekend away and discovering that while the PC’s been off all that time, the bloody external drive you forgot to unplug has been spinning for sixty completely pointless hours.

There’s a second button on the front of the box, that runs some automatic backup software of unknown quality. You may find that useful. If you don’t (or aren’t running Windows), just don’t install the software and the button will be harmless.

The Noontec box is made out of aluminium, so it ought to get decent convective cooling if you set it up vertically in the supplied stand. Any 7200RPM drive should be OK in it, if you don’t live in a tropical jungle.

If this box cost $AU150 or something, I’d find it hard to recommend. For $AU77 delivered, though, its convenience features make it a winner. It even comes with a padded bag!

Australian shoppers can click here to order it from Aus PC Market.

Microsoft’s IntelliMouse Explorer 3.0 was, arguably, the best mouse a right-handed user could get when I reviewed it - and compared it with Logitech’s show-off dual-pickup MouseMan Dual Optical - back in 2001.

And, as you may have heard, it has returned.

The final decision back in ‘01 came down to what shape you preferred, and left-handers were left out in the cold then, as they still pretty much are now.

But the Explorer 3.0 felt good to little old right-handed me, and it worked well. The two side thumb buttons are in just the right place, and the mouse feels neither too small nor too big. I like a teeny mouse for use with a laptop, when you often have a crummy wrist angle and need to hold the mouse with your fingertips from above to avoid strain injuries, but with an ergonomically correct desk setup, a big, though sculpted, mouse like this works for me. Perhaps I’m getting set in my ways in my old age, but I’ve kind of settled on the Explorer 3.0.

(I don’t want a cordless mouse; yes, they work perfectly well these days, but I prefer a bit less weight and zero battery concerns. I keep my mouse cord organised with a simple weight, which you can readily make yourself; that may have something to do with the disappearance of the WireWeights company. More elaborate cord management contraptions are still on sale!)

Explorer 3s seem to last pretty well, too. My mouse gets a whole lot of use, but I can count on at least three years of service from an Explorer 3.0 before the cable goes flaky or the wheel starts mis-counting.

Microsoft were left behind in the feature-chart race, though. So they retired the 3.0, and created a new and awful version 4.0 of the Explorer.

This whole post is very much the outside scoop for gamers, of course, but the Explorer 4.0’s suckage centred around its new and allegedly fantastic “tilt wheel”, which you could not only roll up and down and click for the button-3 function, but could also tilt left and right for horizontal scrolling.

The tilt function made the click function hard to use, and they deleted the clicky detents in the wheel rotation that’re essential when gamers want to accurately select a weapon.

So people who liked the old 3.0 started paying premiums for new old stock on eBay. Microsoft eventually noticed this, and reintroduced the older model.

Apparently the new Explorer 3 has a faster sensor chip in it, or something, but the change isn’t significant enough that Microsoft bothered calling the new-old-mouse the Explorer 3.1. It is, for all practical intents and purposes, the same as the good old 3.0.

Except now, as you can see, it’s dark slate-grey, with only slightly cheesy matte silver side buttons.

Here in Australia, m’verygoodfriends at Aus PC Market sell the new Explorer 3 for $AU69.30 including delivery anywhere in the country. Australian shoppers can click here to order one.

That’s really not a bad price at all. Microsoft’s fancy-pants Razer-collaboration Habu costs twice as much, and Logitech’s flagship corded mouse, the G5, is not a lot cheaper.

Microsoft now seem to be calling the Explorer 4.0 just the “IntelliMouse Explorer“, and OEM (no-fancy-box) versions of it can be had in the States for quite a bit less than the price of a new 3.0. At that price it’s a perfectly OK desktop mouse, but it’s still no good for many games. Aus PC Market have given up selling it.

Interestingly, Microsoft’s main list of mice not including the 3.0 at all any more. Look under “gaming products“, though, and you can find it, next to the Habu.

The Explorer 4.0 tilt wheel also lives on in some even swoopier products. I’m not itching to try any of them, though.

Viva 2001!