Double click test that times the second press

Usually, though an early fault can stay quiet for a hundred. What raises the odds is copying the presses that trigger it in daily use rather than clicking the way a test invites you to: soft, unhurried, and from the same finger position you normally use. If a run comes back clean and the mouse still misbehaves on the desktop, run it again with the lightest press you can make land, then try holding the mouse at the angle you hold it while browsing — a contact that only fails under a slight twist of the shell is common enough to be worth ruling out.

A firm press carries momentum into the contact, and a contact that arrives with momentum behind it settles in one motion. A gentle press lets the metal leaf approach its seat slowly, so the tiny rebound as it lands takes longer to die away — and the whole fault is that rebound outlasting the window the mouse allows for it. The wiping action of a hard press also drags the contact across its mating surface and scrapes off some of the film that builds on it, which is why pressing hard can seem to cure the mouse for an afternoon.

No, and the two settings are unrelated in a way worth understanding. That slider decides only how close together two separate presses must be before the system treats them as one gesture; it ships at 500 ms and moves roughly between 200 and 900 ms on Windows. A failing switch delivers its second press somewhere between 5 and 40 ms after the first, which is inside every position on that slider, so dragging it to the fast end changes nothing except how hard your deliberate double clicks become.

It can hide it, and the hiding has a price. Several gaming mice expose a debounce setting in their own software — Razer, Glorious and a number of the smaller brands ship one — and raising it from around 4 ms to 12 or 16 ms makes the mouse discard its own rebound before it leaves the device. What you buy with that is a mouse that now waits longer before reporting your real presses, which is a poor trade if you paid for a fast one, and it stops working once the contact has degraded past the largest window on offer.

Probably not, because a worn contact has no idea which window has focus. Check three things in this order: whether the vendor software loads a profile of its own when that program starts, whether the button carries a macro that sends two clicks by design, and whether an accessibility setting — sticky keys, filtered clicks — is changing what one press means. If this page shows a clean run and the doubling survives all three, the last suspect is the program's own handling of rapid input rather than anything under your hand.

That depends on whether you can solder, because the fix is a component swap rather than a setting. The switch under most left buttons is a 6 mm micro-switch of the Omron D2FC family or a clone of it, it costs about a dollar, and replacing it is three joints on a through-hole board — well within a first soldering project, though it does mean opening a mouse whose warranty may still be alive. Contact cleaner squirted through the shell buys weeks rather than months, because it washes the film away without restoring the tension the leaf has lost.

Give them a reading rather than a description, which is what Copy the log produces. The block of text names the date, the browser and operating system the run happened in, the button under test, how many presses you made, and then one line per incident with the two press numbers and the gap in milliseconds. Twelve presses out of sixty arriving in pairs 9 ms apart is a measurement a support desk can escalate; “it sometimes clicks twice” is a sentence they have a script for.