Best cheap mouse that works well in both Mac OS and Windows?

[developstopfix]

I'm surprised I even have to ask this as I figured by now something as common as a computer mouse would be fairly standardized and should "just work". I have a cheap Logitech M500 wired mouse, and while it works fine in Windows, it doesn't work so great in Mac OS (Sierra currently, but had the same issues in El Capitan before that). The main issue is with the scroll wheel: when scrolling up or down just one "click" of the wheel at a time, the page of whatever app I'm using scrolls only the tiniest amount, not even a full line. I really have to crank the mouse wheel to get it moving. I've tried Logitech's software as well as USB Overdrive. The latter improves things but still doesn't fix the issue entirely. Is there another decent cheap mouse out there that actually works well under Mac OS / OS X? Or is there just something wrong with my particular mouse?

[Daniel Beardsmore]

Funny, I have the exact same problem in Tiger. I never blamed the Logitech mouse I use (some laser mouse I got some years ago, MX400 probably, they never though to write that on it) — I always figured that it was just how Mac OS X did accelerated scrolling. Windows has no scrolling acceleration. Mac OS X's behaviour is similar to Microsoft IntelliPoint's scroll wheel acceleration but a lot more extreme. I'm not aware that the mouse can influence scrolling acceleration — I figure it just sends wheel forward and wheel backwards events, which is how Windows natively behaves.

Tiger also has painfully slow and tedious pointer movement: I'm one of those people who moves the mouse with their wrist instead of their whole arm, and Macs just can't deal with that. In Windows you can speed up the mouse by a huge level and you get crazy acceleration out of it (the MS IMO is so slow, I have the speed on one step below maximum), but Mac pointer motion feels is slow and borderline linear.

[developstopfix]

You're right, the issue is with how the current versions of Mac OS handle scrolling acceleration, mainly that they don't let you disable it and the default values are way too low for slow scrolling. I found something on GitHub that fixes it for me, but I doubt it'll work for Tiger (did Tiger even have accelerated scrolling?).

Just out of curiosity, are you using an old PPC Mac?

[Daniel Beardsmore]

I have an old PPC Mac Mini with Tiger, and it does do what you describe. (I occasionally use some @old@ (2006) PPC software. I've used later versions of Mac OS, but normally remotely, so in those cases the mouse is under Windows control, and generally via a trackpad the rest of the time.)