Device puts both hands on the PC wheel

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Wrong avenue of Microsoft attack on hardware

Here's what they're already doing in this area to 'help' customers. They're crippling their hardware products so that they only work within specific Microsoft apps and are less functional in other companies' software.

The most glaring example is with their newest Mouse driver (5.0). In the 4.x level drivers you could assign the buttons to application specific tasks and had a wide range keyboard-to-mouse mappings available. With the 5.0 driver, you can only assign the mouse buttons (there are 5 of them on most MS mice) to common tasks for IE, Outlook, and Office. Want to have a thumb button act as the control key to make it easy to open a new page in a tab in Firefox? You can't do that. Want to configure the scroll wheel click as a middle mouse button click for a game and as a special keyboard shortcut in Photoshop. No dice.

It's really too bad they've done this to the driver since their new hardware by itself is pretty good. This is just one of many 'customer unfriendly' actions that are starting to drive long time loyal Microsoft customers away from their products.

Posted by: jfrankcarr   Posted on: 03/26/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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