I am a big fan of using the hitting that scroll wheel on my mouse. But one of the things I find is that it doesn’t scroll as fast as I’d like, and when I change the scroll speed to a higher number, say from 1 to 5, it resets back to 1 the very next time I boot up. Frustrating, irritating and all the above!

Apparently, I’m not the only one that’s had this issue which seems to frequently arise if your keyboard has touchpad on Windows XP. And I do have a touchpad and I do use the XP OS (I actually have an IBM Thinkpad keyboard to go with a Dell desktop, weird I know).

After some digging there were a couple workarounds. One was to fiddle with the registry, the other was to check out the driver.

I’m not one to poke around the registry as it can be quite a dangerous place if you don’t know what you’re doing, so I chose the second option which ultimately led to my solution.

I first right clicked the “My Computer” icon on my desktop, clicked “properties” -> ”hardware”-> “device manager” then clicked on “Mice and other pointing devices” which told me what I had.

Turns out I have a Synaptics touchpad, so I went to the Synaptics website, downloaded the latest driver and installed it (just unzip it, then run it). Now the setting I put on my mouse scroll wheel actually get saved after reboot!

Ahh, the little things in life. Who says there’s no joy in a mouse scroll wheel?