Over the course of the past few months, I’ve noticed an increasingly infurating problem with my mouse, whereby single clicks of the left, and then subsequently the right button would be interpreted either as double clicks or no click at all. I use right click to paste into terminal windows quite a lot and so having commands double-paste led to much frustration and ocassionally unintented consequences for the system at the other end of said terminal.

Being a bodger/hacker/repair officionado I decided I should have a crack at fixing it rather than buying a new mouse and quickly found this excellent Instructables guide to which I have but a couple of points to add:

1. Before you remove the microswitch cover, add a bit of tape over microswitch to hold in white pusher otherwise can ping off into a low-earth-orbit.

2. If you do lose it, I found that a trimmed down lever/retaining clip from an RJ-45 connector (8P8C if you insist) can suffice.

3. If you totally wreck it (either by losing the above part or ruining the spring during the immensely frustrating resassembly), then replacement ones are available from amazon for not too much, or even cheaper on eBay direct from China (usual caveats apply). Disappointingly, my usual preferred electronics suppliers (RS, Farnell, Digikey, etc.) didnt have stock so I only have grey sources for this part.

NB: the (nn M) suffix in the part name is the rated number of millions of actuations. In my G500 were fitted the 10M part which had finally given up after about 7 years of hard use. Happily, I managed to get things back together and working (after a fair bit of swearing) and am free from clicking catastrophe.