Hailing from the ‘GHOST’ series of mice, the GIGABYTE Aivia M8600 is treated to a similar software front end whereby you are given the option of either a Flash or non-Flash installation. Once the software is installed a quick reboot is called for to enable the driver level software of the program to operate correctly. The mouse does however work perfectly fine in both wired and wireless scenarios without any software installation but you will need the software utility to take advantage of the many features the mouse has to offer.
The front-end of the utility looks to be very intimidating with lots of buttons to configure, even in wireless mode (above) there are many options available. As you can identify by the leaf and battery icons towards the top left of the menu, the mouse is currently in wireless and power saving mode. This will certainly help to optimise battery life as the mouse will be placed into standby after a short period of time. If however you want to use the mouse in game then switching to Gaming Mode will extend the amount of time the mouse will be powered up without any activity before going to sleep. Obviously, if the mouse is plugged in, it will not go into sleep mode at all.
It is worth pointing out that should you wish to have a play around with the full feature set of the GHOST software, you will need to use the mouse in the wired state. Note the differences between the two screenshots above.
Being symmetrical, the Aivia M8600 can be used by both left and right handed people and GIGABYTE have allowed for this by adding a button in the GHOST software which will quickly alternate between left and right hand mode. Perhaps less useful but nonetheless welcome is the ability to change the GHOST icon on the mouse to one of 27 predetermined colours (black being off). Unfortunately, the chevron colours cannot be changed.
One of the best features of the GHOST software though is to programme the mouse with an array of macro settings. You can either chose one of the many predefined macro scripts such as cut and paste which will ease the burden of windows short-cuts or you can write your own using a very intuitive drag and drop system. You just drag the icon you want to into the macro editing window, set the execute function then drag that newly created macro onto which ever button you would like to use to initiate that macro. You can even set the amount of delay between each key/mouse press or conversely ignore mouse presses and just have keyboard macro scripts. Once you have all of your scripts setup the way you prefer you can back them up for retrieval later or share them with a friend/forum.
Writing macro scripts can however be confusing at the best of times and while the GHOST software is relatively easy to use, it does take a little getting used to but perseverance will prove fruitful if you are a fan of macro scripts.
The next tab along from Macro Editing is the Sensitivity tab. As the name suggests this is where you can alter the sensitivity of both the X and Y axis from 100-6600 DPI. The polling rate can also be adjusted here from 125-1000 but I do not see why anyone would purposely want a mouse to lag so setting this to anything less than the maximum would be counter productive in my view. Each setup can also be linked to one of four profiles signified by the chevron pictures above the 3 main sliders.
The third tab is for setting the aptly named Scrolling Speed. Sadly, there was no indication of how slow of fast each setting was so this would need to be used on a trial and error basis. A little indication of 3, 6 or 10 lines would have been infinitely more useful instead of the pretty (but useless) coloured vertical and horizontal charts.
The final tab is simply a link to the mouse properties within the Windows operating system.
