Friday, January 27, 2012

Reverse the mouse scroll direction in Windows 7

Anybody familiar with iOS and OS X Lion will know that the mouse scrolling direction now mimics the action of "pushing" or "pulling" the page on the screen, rather than controlling the window's scroll tab.  In other words, it is reversed from earlier convention.

In OS X Lion, scrolling the mouse wheel up, would be as if you were "nudging" the page up.  While scrolling the mouse wheel down, would be as if you were "nudging" the page down.  This is the behaviour in iOS as well.  In some ways, it is more intuitive.  However, some would argue that it is actually more frustrating.  This topic is highly subjective in my opinion, and I won't be debating in this post about which way is better and which way is worse.

What I will be discussing, is how to make Windows 7 mouse scroll behave like iOS and OS X Lion.

I find that I get a little disorientated with mouse scroll when switching from using the iPad and MacBook Pro, to a Windows 7 machine.  Particularly so, when it is "crunch time" and I really need to get things done fast.  Enough was enough, so I decided I would try to find a way to make Windows 7 "reverse" the default mouse scroll direction.  Here is what I dug up from the web, and worked for me.  I cannot take credit for this little tip, as I did not come up with it.

Steps :-

1. In Windows 7 Control Panel, open up the "Mouse Properties" dialogue windows, and click on the "Hardware" tab.

2. Open the device properties window by clicking on the "Properties" button at the bottom right corner, just above the "Apply" and "Help" buttons.

3. In the device properties dialogue window, click on the "Details" tab and select "Hardwire Ids" from the "Property" drop-down list.  You should see a list of entries starting with "HID...".  Write down the values that start with "HID\VID_???...".

4. Close device properties by clicking "Cancel".

5. Close "Mouse Properties" by clicking "Cancel".

6. Find and open the application "regedt32.exe" as an administrator, if you are not already logged in as one.

7. Navigate to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\HID", and look for an entry that resembles the "VID_???..." number that you wrote down earlier in step 3.

8. Open each child entry under your specified "VID_???..." key, and open the "Device Parameters" key. In my case, there were two child entries with a long "serial number"-like alphanumeric text string.

9. There should be a key named "FlipFlopWheel" under each of the "Device Parameters" key.  Reverse the entry value for the "FlipFlopWheel".  i.e. if default is "0" (zero) change it to "1", and vice-versa.

10. Do the same step 9, for each alphanumeric text string key entry, and their "Device Parameters", "FlipFlopWheel".

11. Close "regedt32.exe".

12. Unplug your USB mouse, and listen or watch for Windows 7's acknowledgement and confirmation that it has recognized the event of the mouse being unplugged.  In my case, it was simply a "USB device unplugged" system sound. Re-connect the mouse and the new settings should have taken effect.  If not, simply shutdown and restart Windows 7.

Done.

References :-

http://superuser.com/questions/310681/inverting-direction-of-mouse-scroll-wheel

http://neosmart.net/forums/showthread.php?t=1373