Drivers and Customization:

Every window open + "On the fly"

   The way Razer uses their drivers for the Copperhead makes me want to jump up and down, point and say “LOOK LOOK SEE, THIS IS HOW YOU DO THAT!” The drivers, are just needed for configuring the mouse.

   The only feature that isn’t available without the drivers is the popup window that lets you adjust the sensitivity. (Sensitivity is different from “Dots per inch”) . But that makes sense because you aren’t going to be able to run software like that without something installed. You just click whatever button you’ve assigned “on the fly sensitivity” to, then roll the scroll wheel up or down, and a small popup comes up over any windows you have open, and shows what value you are changing it to. Since I don’t click the middle mouse button much, that’s the one I assigned to that function on one of my profiles.

   For everything else, once you configure the buttons, and the profiles to fit your needs, you can uninstall the drivers, take the mouse to your laptop, your friends house, work, school, whatever. All your settings will be remembered, and work flawlessly.

   You can’t store too much information in each button, only around 7 or 8 keystrokes, but you can customize each button with a different bind. You can add 50ms delays into the macro’s for something that might need to wait before the next button is pressed. Games like Jedi Knight or even UT2004, that have any kind of special key combination for power ups or special moves, one click of the mouse and it’s done every single time.

   The rest of the configuration software is simple enough, you select which profile you want to change, then you decide what polling Hz and DPI you would like, change any of the other 7 buttons (2 on the left, 2 on the right, main 2 and scroll wheel). There is a list of common button functions in a dropdown menu, but of course you can bind a button to any other key on your keyboard. When you apply the settings, it will freeze up for a second while the settings are saved to the flash memory on the mouse.

Bottom view

Side view

Rear view

   To change profiles, you simply flip the mouse over, and with your finger (or the eraser on a pencil if you have really fat fingers) just press the button that’s near the back of the mouse. The lighting on the mouse will flash the same number of times to correspond to the number of the profile you are on (1-5). Simple, but easy to understand.

   If you haven't figured it out from the specs, the Copperhead is a true "laser mouse" which lets it run at 2000DPI. The human eye can't see the laser and it's labeled as "eye safe" (but they still warn against looking at it). As an interesting side point, I found out that while I can't see the laser, my camera can.

Cool, lasers!