It seems a lot of people - myself included - are having problems with USB mice in Windows Vista. After a Windows Update, my mouse simply stopped working. The laptop’s touchpad was fine and the USB socket was also fine. After a bit of googling I found JustSomeGuy1’s thread on techguy.org with an apparent fix. The only problem was Vista wasn’t even leaving me a broken entry for a USB Browser Mouse in the Device Manager, to go and manually delete the bad drivers. Deleting things out of the System32 folder seems like a rather hands-on, roll-your-sleeves-up and get stuck in approach anyway - this is 2009 after all!

Simple fix:

• In Device Manager select the “Unknown Device”, right click and “Update Driver Software…”
• Select “Browse my computer for driver software”.
• Select “Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer”.
• Choose “HID-Compliant Mouse”.
• Click “Next” and Windows will install the new driver (successfully I hope!).
• Enjoy clicking on things once again.

It’s a much friendlier fix for less savvy PC users, so I hope it works for you. I for one could not spend another day giving myself finger cramp with the touchpad on my laptop.

I’ve noticed recently that many people who use the variable font/text size feature while surfing the web are quite unaware that modern browsers provide a much neater alternative: Zooming the entire page in and out.

I was never a fan of text zooming. If it allowed people to read the text better that was of course a benefit, but too often it just didn’t work. Layouts weren’t always built to cater for varying text sizes and could become even more confusing to understand.

So cue the idea of not zooming just the text, but magnifying the whole page and therefore keeping everything in proportion. Genius! Not a new idea granted, Opera has featured it for years, but it’s an immensely handy feature not only for people with poor eyesight. Users with large screens at very high resolutions, or for developers to take a closer graphical look at the positioning of elements on the page. Controls can usually be found in the “View” menu or by handy keyboard shortcuts:

• Zoom In: CTRL +
• Zoom Out: CTRL -
• Reset: CTRL 0

These days page zooming is becoming more widespread with good support in mainstream browsers Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, as well as lesser-known Opera. Apple Safari and Google Chrome have yet to implement it, which I’m surprised and a little disappointed about.. Come on guys, catch up!