Expert: Bill DeShawn - 5/2/2004

Question
I use an older Microsoft mouse with Architectural Desktop 3.3, and the scroll wheel can be used to pan a drawing view in any direction by just holding it down.

I recently bought a new wheel mouse from Microsoft, supposedly with horizontal scroll as well as vertical, the so called Tilt Wheel,  which loaded the version 5 drivers for me.

Since then, I can not pan with the new mouse or even with the old mouse. The feature seems to be disabled. I checked the Autocad settings, and the correct settings are active, but the mouse does not respond at all. Nor does the horizontal scroll work within Autocad.

Has Microsoft really released a driver that disables program specific functions?

If so, what were they thinking?  

Answer
You're not the only one.  Here's what Daniel has to say:
Convinced the Boss to shell out $150 on a Microsoft Stupidmouse Explorer
2.0.  The Boss bought 5 and they suck.  Be warned quite contary to the hype
of reassingable buttons it is pretty much un-customisable.  There is no
keystroke feature with the 5.0 driver and you can't assign the wheel button
as a middle button.  Add to this massive delays in activating the middle
button and it is pretty much useless.
Not quite as comfortable as it looks and the middle button needs about 10
Newtons of down ward pressure to activate as well.  A double click to zoom
extents is almost impossible, especially coupled with the useless response
time.  The only plus is if you ever master it your wife will never leave
you.  Interestingly if you set a thumb button to "AutoScroll" (substitute
for "Middle Button" but not as effective) the response is as it should be.
Also the tilt wheel is not supported well (won't work in AutoCAD) thus
making the extra feature a dud.  Whilst the scroll wheel is exeptionally
smooth (my favorite feature) it seems a little too sensitive and jumps all
over the place a the slightest hint of a touch (you might get used to this
given time).

There was no key stroke feature on this driver.  This meant that you could
not program the two thumb buttons to do anything remotely usefull in
AutoCAD.  Anyone use Forward or Backward in Acad?  You could set it as copy
or paste, maybe escape, or to switch windows, undo or save, but all of these
are very easily done by your left hand which would otherwise be doing
nothing anyway and thus wouldn't provide any significant gain.

Another nag is that I keep performing an unwanted double click all the time
which was very annoying.  I am convinced that this must be an issue with the
button as I had the double click speed set as high as possible which makes
it very hard to unitentionally invoke and I still had regular occurences.

Use the older 4.12 driver I hear you say!  Well if we could manage to
install it on a machine that had previously had the 5.0 driver on that would
be a help.  It seems some files remain in the system and Win XP or the
driver won't use the older 4.12 files.  Be warned again that using this
driver also does not fix any of the middle button issues.  Whilst keystrokes
can be added the range is poor as not all keys are enabled.  Also you can
not set "Ctrl+Alt+" you must add another keystroke.  As described in my post
on the 04/04/04 this makes an excellent method of accessing all your Osnaps
from the keyboard without lossing the default functions of the Function
Keys.  The Logitech driver does allow this so don't tell me it can't be
done.

Finally I don't whether it was that I couldn't get comfortable with this
mouse but the accuracy seemed to be poor.  One possible reason may have been
that there is no orentation feature in the driver thus I may have not been
moving the mouse in the right direction but the number of miselects was
huge.

All in all I would strongly warn aganist buying this mouse, especially for
AutoCAD users, what looked like a potentially great tool is a massive dud.
Hopefully Microsoft will do a huge review of the drivers and urgently fix
these faults and add some good simple features that have been ommited.

That's my 2 cents worth.

Daniel.