I habitually operate the mouse with either hand, ie. I switch from one side to the other. This is especially useful, when doing a lot of clicking, eg. during extended periods of mundane cut & pastes, like putting together release notes for the product. This way, I can evenly balance the wear & tear of my wrists. For quite some time, I just used a second mousepad, basically as a placeholder, so that there’s no mess piling, where the mouse belongs both sides of the keyboard. Now I got myself a second mouse!

Happy as I am with such a setup, I must say, that XP is rather limiting here. All the options are single (the control panel icon is “mouse”, not “mice”, so that’s not surprising) - no separate speed, precision, double-click and wheel settings (this one sucks, would be nice to have an additional set of controls). Still, there’s some logic behind this, such an asymmetry could be perplexing. But if things should be kept symmetric, what is the reason for assuming that one has either two right and two left hands (button settings)?

I’m just getting used to the notion of having two mice, but there’s quite a potential here - games that support two mice, just like the consoles have double joysticks, a cheap alternative to one-handed (why one-handed?) 3D controllers, or just being able to “juggle” things on the desktop? An article I read recently (have to search for it), sidenoted on how the idea of a real desktop was developed into the computer desktop paradigm, where the use of two hands was replaced by one-handed point-and-click actions. I sense that the two mouse setup could really redefine the future of the desktop!