Software and Razer Synapse
Like any other mouse, the Razer Lachesis can be used without installing any additional software. The mouse retains its characteristics but your customization opportunities are limited to switching the five profiles and the resolution levels.
The driver’s appearance and overall functionality have long remained intact for all Razer products. The consistent corporate style is one of the main constituents of the company’s success, attracting loyal customers.
The driver’s main screen offers basic settings such as assigning functions to all the buttons and the wheel, turning the highlighting of the scrolling wheel and logotype on and off, USB polling rate (choosing from the standard value of 125MHz, 500MHz, and the Lachesis’s default 1000MHz), and the flexible control over the 5 levels of sensor resolution (from 125 to 4000dpi) you can switch between quickly. Besides, this screen offers a button to update the driver and firmware.
When you press the bright green string with a profile name, a user-defined profile management tab opens up at the bottom of the main screen. This technology is officially dubbed Razer Synapse. You can save up to 5 profiles into the device’s 32KB memory. This capacity is enough for each profile to include all of the driver settings, including the macro-commands assigned to individual buttons. Besides, each profile can be named and even linked to a specific application. When this application is launched, the mouse switches to the given profile automatically. It’s handy if you use different settings for different games. You can also choose a profile from the driver window, or by pressing a special button on the bottom of the mouse, or assign another button for that purpose (by default, the two right-side buttons are responsible for switching between the profiles up and down). If the Enable Onscreen Display option is turned on, the name of the current profile is shown in the bottom right corner of the screen for a couple of seconds.
There are two tabs on the left that contain mouse speed settings. The Sensitivity tab is where you can select the desired level of sensitivity, the scrolling speed of the wheel, and the speed of a double click. You can enable the Universal Scrolling option (when the wheel button is pressed, the mouse’s movements perform the scrolling function instead of moving the pointer). The onscreen indication of the On-the-Fly Sensitivity feature is turned on here, too. To use it, you should specify a button for activating this feature, save the profile and move the scrolling wheel while pressing the specified button. There will appear a sensitivity level indicator in the bottom right of the screen. You can adjust it “on the fly” from 1 to 10 stepping 0.5. As opposed to the physical switching of the sensor resolution, this feature only works if you’ve installed the driver. It is actually the software filter mentioned in the previous section.
The Advanced Settings page contains four additional sliders, two of which are responsible for adjusting the sensitivity vertically and horizontally – some gamers find this feature helpful in increasing the aiming accuracy. The Win Pointer Speed performs the function of the appropriate slider from the OS’s control panel. The Acceleration slider has no relation to the mouse acceleration in Windows XP but controls a similar setting of the Razer driver. Fortunately, it can be turned off. It’s a matter of taste, of course, but I don’t quite understand who may need to accelerate a modern gaming mouse.
Finally, you can choose the Advanced Functions option to open a tab for creating macros. Every button of the Lachesis can be assigned a macro of a certain type: duplicating a keyboard key, performing a standard action (from copy/paste to launching a program or locking the PC), or a traditional macro (a user-defined sequence of actions: key strokes with spaces between them). The latter can be especially useful in games. For example, you can create a macro for semi-automatic purchase of weapons at the beginning of a Counter-Strike round. All macros are stored in the device’s own memory and will survive even the formatting of your hard disk.
