I’m a leftie, but all my life I’ve used right-handed mice in my left hand. I needed to replace my old Microsoft Optical Mouse, and found the DeathAdder Left-Handed Edition. It’s the perfect size and shape for me, but they did the weird thing of switching the left- and right-click buttons.
It’s easy enough in most any operating system to swap the buttons in settings. However — at least with Windows — the buttons are only changed locally. So when connecting to other hosts via Remote Desktop the buttons revert to their hardware configuration. That’s a no-go for me, but I liked the mouse so much that I decided to mod the hardware instead.
Fortunately, it’s very easy to reconfigure the buttons in the DeathAdder. The buttons are on a separate circuit board from the sensor and control circuitry. The boards are connected by a ribbon cable, and it’s just a matter of swapping two conductors on that cable.
Razer Support
I don’t make use of companies’ customer support too often, because I prefer to solve most problems myself. Plus, I’m more often than not completely disappointed by support interactions.
Razer’s support committed one of the cardinal sins as far as I’m concerned: They didn’t actually read my original email, and replied with a cookie-cutter solution (which didn’t solve anything).
Another pet peeve of mine is that they wouldn’t address the issue on Twitter, and instead directed me to their web-based support form on their site. I’m grateful that they responded quickly on Twitter, but the useless support response took over 24 hours.
.@RazerSupport Re the left hand DeathAdder; It's great, but are reversed buttons typical? Sadly changing in sw doesn't translate over RDP :/
— Scott Dot (@SCOTTdotdot) September 1, 2016
Basically what happened was that in my support submission I explained my issue with the buttons and their not working in RDP despite changing the buttons’ purpose via Control Panel, and more importantly asked the very specific question: “Is there a way to change the buttons in hardware?”. (There’s a button on the bottom of the mouse to change profiles, so I was hoping that it had an undocumented or poorly-documented ability to do that.)
The response that support gave was step-by-step instructions on switching the buttons around in the Windows settings. And that’s it.
I wrote back to them, briefly expressing my irritation that they didn’t actually read my original question, and asking again if the buttons could be switched in hardware.
The answer was no.
And that’s why this video exists.
