Buying a little more time from my Microsoft Optical Mouse
I love my mouse. No, I don’t think you quite understand – I love my mouse. It’s not like it’s anything special either, you can get one off of eBay for about five bucks… but of course it was about $35 when I got it, back when optical mouses were still somewhat new. In fact it’s only quite recently that most new computers came with an optical mouse.
But even so, this mouse has served me well. It’s now called the “Microsoft Optical Mouse Basic“, but back when I got it I think it was just called the “Optical Wheel Mouse”. Regardless, it’s out-lived virtually all my wife’s mousing devices, most of which have been the wireless variety. I’m now used to the cord on it, we have quite the rapport and it never seems to get in the way… and it’s nice not having to change out batteries every freakin’ month.
Unfortunately though I have this rather nasty habit of highlighting and un-highlighting text while I read it. It annoys my wife no-end, the constant click-click-clicking while I’m engrossed in something particularly interesting, but I figure at least it’s better than me mutilating my fingers which is my other annoying concentration-habit.
The end result is that the micro-switch for my left mouse button has reached the end of it’s operating life. It bounces now, and dragging anything with it is a nightmare. I have a new mouse on the way (I actually bought one already, but it’s defective so it went back, and now I’m waiting again), but I can’t keep using my computer like this.
So I took my mouse apart with a view to switch out the left mouse button switch from another mouse – unfortunately they’re different switches and it won’t physically fit in my mouse… so I came up with a hackish solution in the mean time. I simply de-soldered the left mouse-button switch, and the switch under the middle mouse button, and swapped them.
I reasoned that the occasional, unintentional double-click on the middle mouse button probably wouldn’t anger me as much as the much more likely double-left-click… and how often do you ever drag with the middle mouse button on Windows systems?
Never.
So it should live until my new mouse gets here, at which point it’ll serve me well as a backup or for when I’m roped into fixing some asshole’s computer. Also, I apologize for the lack of technical content in this article. 
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