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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 at 1:08 pm and is filed under Accessibility, Tips For The PC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.