Pages

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Flipping your Mouse Wheel in Windows 7

I've gotten used to Lion's goofy "natural scrolling" behavior.  When I bootcamp over into Windows, the "normal" scrolling irks me.  I've found two (Volker Voeking and Tom Mason)  perfect posts on how to do this in the registry (without using flakey softwarez) but they weren't entirely obvious for my Mighty Mouse.  If you know the hardware ID might start with a big mess between braces, you should be able to just use either of those.

Here's my quick redux for my own remembery porpoises:
  • Open Control Panel > All Control Panel Items > Mouse.
  • Go to the Hardware tab, take a look at the Location for each device.
  • Get the Properties of the mouse you wanna flip.
  • Go to the Details tab, select Hardware ID from the Property drop-down.
  • The entry containing "VID" somewhere in it is what you want.
And then do the registry pieces:
  • Hit the Windows (command) key, "regedit" and hit return.
  • Expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SYSTEM > CurrentControlSet > Enum > HID
  • Expand whatever device ID you found previously, expand whatever garbled entry is under that.
  • Select Device Parameters, right-click on FlipFlopWheel, then choose Modify.
  • Change this from 0 to 1.
  • Exit.
The next time your mouse is recognized, it'll inherit the new setting.  To make that happen, you can just power it down, wait a dozen seconds, and power it back up.  That otter do it!  Welcome back to wackyland.

3 comments:

  1. I've written a small c# app to change the registry settings for all devices. It enumerates every device and changes the 'FlipFlopWheel' setting to 1 or 0 depending on which button you press.

    the full source is available on github, the source code that actually does the flipping the registry setting (<100 lines) is here: https://github.com/jamie-pate/flipflop-windows-wheel/blob/master/Form1.cs

    for those just wanting to 'get it done' here is the executable (asks for UAC elevation) https://github.com/jamie-pate/flipflop-windows-wheel/blob/master/bin/Debug/FlipWheel.exe

    ReplyDelete
  2. Awesome - this helped me finally fix my infuriating Logitech K400r touchpad. Thanks very much. You explained it perfectly.

    ReplyDelete