Razer Lachesis

Installation

As with any USB product, installation is as easy as plugging it in. With both XP and Vista, the mouse is installed flawlessly with basic drivers and unlike other Razer mice, the advanced functions work without drivers. The top two buttons behind the large scroll wheel are instantly usable for DPI adjustment, flicking between highest and lowest in four steps. The right-hand side buttons change the profile of the mouse up and down, which has no effect apart from flashing the LED’s of the mouse when pressed until the drivers are installed. The other side buttons are forward and backward in your browser which is odd when you first accidentally press one and flip back a page on the web.

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While it sounds like a small deal that the DPI adjustment works without drivers, other Razer mice wouldn’t do this, and you’d have to install the drivers and then restart your PC before they worked. If you were to remove the mouse, you’d have to reinstall the drivers before the mouse would be detected again. Razer have done away with this additional hassle which can only be a good thing.

It becomes obvious that the DPI is done by the mouse, rather than software, as when the Death Adder changes DPI in Vista, there is an obvious lag where the cursor stops moving as you change setting. The Lachesis however immediately and smoothly adjusts its sensitivity when you push the button.

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Once you’ve installed the drivers, you won’t have to restart which is another bonus. You’ll see a control panel that any Razer product owner will know well. Personally, I think it’s a little over the top, and would prefer a simple design with better usability rather than gamer-styled. You’ll see a picture of the Lachesis with the buttons labelled and the option to change the function of each.

This is somewhere you’ll spend a lot of time when you first get the mouse choosing the settings that you like the most, playing a game then tweaking them until you can forget about this driver page. You get a whole host of option for each of the buttons, such as button macros, single key presses, DPI adjustment, general Windows commands (start, copy, paste etc.), scrolling and more. You can set the DPI buttons to scroll through the different settings, or to choose a particular one, which goes for the profile too. You can set the steps that the mouse sensitivity jumps between with the DPI switcher bar at the bottom of the driver window. It allows you to choose different settings in 125 DPI increments, from 125 all the way up to 4000; a nice change from simple set values.

There are 5 profiles that you can set which can be invoked by a particular application. For example, you may have Crysis set up so that when you start the game, the mouse changes the side buttons for reload and pick up and immediately changes the mouse to your preferred DPI setting for this game. You could go as far as having, say, different profiles set up for different player classes on Battlefield 2142 which the sniper profile enjoying a lower DPI and the side buttons for zoom, while the assault class gets a higher DPI and reload and grenade as the side buttons. Of course you can set the buttons to do anything you like, which also goes for the usual left and right click buttons.

The mouse comes with something called Razer Synapse which is actually just 32KB of on-board memory. Sounds silly to put memory on a mouse, but it actually makes a whole lot of sense. Your computer doesn’t actually store any of the profile information, and the computer actually asks your mouse instead. This means that if you were to take this mouse with you, and plug it into a friends PC, you will instantly have all of your profiles loaded and ready to use, even if they don’t have the Razer software installed. While you PC doesn’t store the 5 profiles, you can tell it to store additional ones and load them into the mouse memory as you see fit.

Overall the installation and usage thus far is top-notch and beats any other mouse I’ve put my fingers on.

Peripherals