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I started to use the mouse with my left hand some years ago (It didnt take me that long to learn, a couple of weeks) since I started to get problems with my right shoulder.

Ever since I use the mouse on the left side and also has the buttos swapped. Now that does not work well when accessing my computer using Remote Desktop on a computer with the mouse on the right side.

Also my primary computer at work has two mouses attached, one on USB and the other via PS/2. It would be nice to configure the left one to have buttons swapped and the right one to be normal. That way I could work bothways.

Is there a way to configure the driver or are there an enhanced driver available that lets me control this per mouse rather than set the swap left/right globally in the Windows UI.

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Interesting question. I too have started using the mouse with my left had for the same reason, but I don't swap the buttons. I left click with my middle finger and right click with my index. It means that I, or anyone else, can still use the mouse right handed without having to change anything. – ChrisF Oct 11 '10 at 11:41
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I found it easier to swap buttons, that way I dont really think about wether I'm using my left or right hand. I have actually had thoughts about modifying the mouse hardware as well. – Ernelli Oct 11 '10 at 11:44

3 Answers

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You can use X-Mouse Button Control to swap the mouse buttons.

X-Mouse Button Control does its changes by intercepting clicks, so they carry downstream to any Remote Desktop session. But I don't think it has per-mouse settings.

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Microsoft Intellipoint mouse drivers handle the swap buttons feature in a different way to the standard mouse drivers, and remote desktop works correctly: A left-click on the physically-connected mouse is sent to the remote machine as a right-click. And when connecting to the machine from elsewhere, Intellipoint does not swap buttons.

However, the Intellipoint software does not swap the buttons over on a non-Intellipoint mouse. So, my home workstation has an Intellipoint mouse to the left of the keyboard, and the supplied Dell mouse to the right of the keyboard. Works a treat, for both left- and right-handed users.

My work PC has two Dell mice, and is running XP. Fortunately the mice have different hardware IDs, so I've modified an .inf file in the Intellipoint driver's installer, and convinced it that one of the mice was made by Microsoft.

However, I wasn't able to get this to work under Win7 last time I tried, so when my new work PC arrives I shall probably buy a Microsoft mouse to go with it.

One gotcha: You have to turn the standard "swap buttons" function off before installing Intellipoint. Otherwise when you remote desktop to that PC from elsewhere, the buttons get swapped.

It's possible that 3rd-party mouse drivers will also work better than the standard drivers.

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A hardware alternative may be a gaming mouse. I have found this SteelSeries mouse that claims to be ambidextrous and driverless. I guess you can swap left/right buttons by clicking another button.

Beware that I haven't tried it myself and it's expensive compared to a normal mouse. I wonder if modifying a normal mouse is worth the saving.

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