changing mouse cursor

What do you mean by "Stingy"

I mean my fingers feel hurt from the sharp pointer pointing towards my left hand. Don't know how to describe it. When you use a right hand to hold the mouse, the pointer feels like you are holding a pencil or something extending from your closed palm. With the left hand, you feel like holding a knife with the sharp side, while the handle is sticking away from you. You see, the point of action (hot spot) is on the top left tip of the arrow. That's what feels sharp.

I don't have the C dev env. Is it free? Any suggestion for free tools that edit cursor resources in DLL?

Thanks.

If you go to your XP control panel, open the "Mouse" properties, and click on the "Pointers" tab. On my system there was a pointer set named "Lefty". This changed all the cursors to lefty ones including the ones used in Notes.

HS

There are two way around for this:

1) You can correct it at the OS level,  as suggested by hshevitz. OS allows you to customize your system upto the desired level.
2) Do it by editing resource file, as suggested by qwaletee. No, C dev env is not free. But there are hordes of Icon/Cursor editor programs available. Freeware, Shareware and Trial versions. But using these programs will be a little too much work.

In most probability you should be able to effectively use hshevitz's suggested method.

I have to refuse hshevitz's answer for two reasons.

First, my XP doesn't have Lefty. None of my colleagues has. Maybe it is part of Plus, which I don't have.

Second, changing the Windows mouse pointer is not useful. I explicitly named two cursors in my original question: drag pointer and hand/finger. Neither of them follow the OS. I have changed XP to use left hand cursors, but Notes is one of the worse offenders.

Seems I have to follow qwaletee's advice. However, without C Dev Env, how can one edit the resource files? I can edit .CUR, but that isn't sufficient. I need to be able to dissect the Notes EXE/DLL files, and replace their bundled resources with my .CURs.

Forgot to mention this. Here are the links to my related lefty cursor questions.

hshevitz, if you can locate how you got your lefty cursor set, please go and answer that question!

mouse cursor reverting back to original default:
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Operating_Systems/WinXP/Q_20651675.html

having two sets of cursors:
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Operating_Systems/WinXP/Q_20651712.html

Lefty mouse:
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Operating_Systems/WinXP/Q_20651714.html

Change mouse cursor in IE:
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Web/Browser_Issues/Q_20651703.html

Pardon me for asking, Irene, but what part of the world are you from?

Hong Kong. Why ask?

This tool helps you do what you wanted to: http://mirror1.heaventools.com/rts/rtsetup.exe

I figured you might be Chinese, because of the way you worded things, and the personal internalization of iconography.  Few Westerners would understand that someone of your culture could actually feel physical symptoms from the way an interface is designed.  I wish yuo luck getting your cursor changed.

Great observation qwaletee. Are you Chinese or have close relationships with some? I wouldn't have dreamt that such deductions are possible.

However, I don't think every of my friends feel the same. At least many of my (Chinese) friends use the normal pointers with a left handed mouse. Don't know whether it is because they won't try to improve the situation or they don't mind about the awkwardness.

Windows is essentially right handed. Even with lefty pointers, the scroll bar is on the right.  It was very annoying back in the wheelless days, for I always felt that my left arm is covering the document when I have to extend my cursor to the far right to scroll.

RanjeetRain, I haven't tried the tool. However, it is far from a free tool. The tag says 59.95! I hope I don't need to use it for more than 30 days...

Well, Windows isn't so much right-handed as it is left-to-right and top-to-bottom.  It was designed by English speakers.  So, the designers tried to put the scrll bars "following" the text, so the vertical scroll bar ends up past the text on the right, and the horizontal scroll bar ends up at the bottom, past the text at the end of the page.  Interestingly, I believe this is also true in the Hebrew, Arabic, and Urdu versions of WIndows, even though those language are right-to-left.  (The menus do switch in those language versions).

I'm not Asian -- I'm Jewish-American -- but I've worked with a number of Chinese, and read a little bit about the Chinese history and culture.

Thanks RanjeetRain.

The Resource Tuner you suggested does the job. It is a 30 day trial, so I have to "try" it quickly. It is very tedious to extract each cursor (a handful of mouse click for each cursor image), edit them (using another tool, for RT doesn't do it) and more clicks to save it back.

More unexpected is the difficulty to locate the cursors. Instead of living in the main EXE, they are scattered in the DLLs. There are 270 EXE/DLL in Notes! Quite something to fish and finish in 30 days...