The Cirque Power Cat Touchpad [PCT] is another type of mouse. It just needs to be plugged in to work, having a cable with a serial connector and an adapter for PS /2 connections. PCT also comes with a pen, special software that requires Windows 95 (explained later) and with an 8 page Users Guide.

Telephone, callback, technical help is free. It's amazing how the initially designed mouse ... ingenious, highly effective and easily mastered ... has been drastically modified and has proliferated into a multitude of shapes and sizes and forms, even though its job now is essentially the same as it has always been.

Thus, this PCT mouse is a flat 4 1/2 in. by 5 in. pad designed to sit fixed, during use, on one's table. It has left and right buttons and an active area of only 3 in. by 2 3/16 in. The standard screen cursors produced are moved and manipulated by touching, tapping and moving a finger around the active area. All of the standard cursor movements can be carried out with this mouse and the User's Guide recommends a "light quick" tap and touch technique for these operations.

I know people who had difficulty learning to manipulate the old standard mouse, and in fact, Windows 3.x came with a tutorial on mouse use. However, from the instant I used that old mouse, I had no trouble with it. Not so with PCT!! Performance with PCT improved with use, but difficulties continued even after about 20 hours of use. It's cursor can be slued around the screen with one's finger easily enough, but I found more precise cursor actions difficult to do smoothly or precisely.

Two operations took special care. The first involves activating a button. If the button sits in isolation, there is no problem; it can be easily tagged But trouble arises if the button is embedded among other buttons ...especially when a long screen-cursor slew exceeded the distance allowed by the small active area; in such cases a finger must be lifted and reapplied. For example, activating File on the Explorer's Menu Bar; the Delete and Rename buttons are next to each other.

Thus, if a file is highlighted for renaming, the process requires that the cursor be slued to Rename (with a finger down on the active area), the finger lifted, and the active area tapped (with the cursor on Rename). Should the sluing cursor accidentally be stopped (finger lifted to stop) on Delete (not hard to do when sluing across the screen), and the finger reapplied to move the cursor up one button, PTC sees a tap and activates Delete. Such various inadvertent activation happened a number of times. Perhaps with practice, such inadvertent activation could be reduced or even eliminated.

The second operation involves Dragging and Dropping. These are required in moving files, icons, or text portions (in word processing activities). Again, when long distances were involved, and especially in word processing, items were inadvertently highlighted or dropped in wrong places. Some of these cases required great effort to undo.

The pen and the special Win 95 software are for using the pad to add one's signature to a document. The small active area doesn't allow much more, but this is a nice feature to have at one's disposal. It takes some practice just to get a smooth signature, and I could not get the pad's signature to look like my written one. Again, more practice would probably improve looks.

For desktop PC's, I don't see a reason to switch from some conventional mouse to a mouse like PCT. However, for traveling with a laptop, I think PCT would be most convenient.