Wacom Graphire - Nice Pen, Lousy Mouse
Written: Jun 12 '00 (Updated Jan 18 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Cheap, nice pen, comes in cool colors, USB
Cons: Mouse is slow and buggy, can't boot with it plugged in.
The Bottom Line: This is a good price for a graphics tablet even if the dimentions are pretty small. Buy it for an inexpensive graphics tablet and don't use it as a mouse.
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| cvilly's Full Review: Wacom Graphire Pen & Mouse Set |
The Graphire is a great idea. An inexpensive graphics tablet and a cordless, balless (sp?) mouse to boot. All for under a hundred bucks! What could be wrong with that? Well...
I bought the Graphire because I had always wanted a graphics tablet for my computer. I was also intrigued by the idea of a cordless mouse. Especially since it was touted as an extremely accurate mouse.
I found a great price on Buy.com and couldn't wait to get it in my hot little hands. When it arrived, I plugged it into my USB port on my eMachines 466id and installed the drivers. Win98 had no trouble recognizing the tablet. So far so good.
I started using the mouse and right away I notice something odd. The pointer on my screen was moving back and forth, 2 pixels this way, 2 pixels that way. Hmm. I then went to the Wacom website and got the latest drivers which are supposed to fix the problem. They didn't. I also notice that the mouse is really slow and not all that accurate as had been promised in the literature.
Next I decide to reboot. Maybe the changes don't take effect until reboot, I thought. Upon reboot, I notice that my machine can't get past the BIOS screen. It just keeps rebooting itself endlessly. I unplug the Graphire and it boots fine. This problem has never gone away. Now any time I need to reboot my machine I have to make sure the Graphire is not plugged in.
I tried to contact Wacom tech support but it is basically non-existant. I had to write support 3 times before getting a useless response. One suggestion was that my screen (21") was so large that its magnetic field was interfering with the mouse. Kind of lame considering that most people who do a lot of graphics have fairly large monitors.
So now the tablet, sadly, sits idle until the next time I need to use the pen. I've got no complaints about the pen. It's great. I guess if you look at it as a sub-$100 graphics tablet I don't have that much to complain about.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 65
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Epinions.com ID:
cvilly
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Location: California
Reviews written: 36
Trusted by: 5 members
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