Solved Mouse Wheel Will Not Scroll

[Richardc269]

Hello again 7 Forums!

Just recently, my trackball was acting funky, so I took out the trackball, plugged in the new BTC Optical Mouse (Just a basic 2 button mouse with a mouse wheel) my dad had sitting in his room...and the mouse wheel won't scroll when I try to scroll with the wheel! If I click the mousewheel, it will move whatever it is scrolling.

Nothing will scroll, and I don't know why!

Not even items outside of the web browser.

Anyone got any ideas?

 

[Night Hawk]

One place to visit is in the Control Panel>Mouse section where you go over to the Wheel tab and try adjusting one or more of the settings and click the apply button to see if any immediate change is noticed.

In the Device Manager there which you might want to visit first you look under "Human Interface Devices" as well as the "Mouse and other pointing devices" items to see if the replacement mouse has been detected properly. It does seem odd however that the scroll wheel wouldn't work automatically unlike what you would see when swapping for a mouse with programmable buttons where you then need more then just a mouse driver but the software that goes with it.

 

[boohbah]

its possible it was "sitting" in your dads room unused as it is broken ,have you asked your dad if it functioned correctly before you "borrowed" it.

 

[Richardc269]

its possible it was "sitting" in your dads room unused as it is broken ,have you asked your dad if it functioned correctly before you "borrowed" it.

Brand new unopened in the box, actually.

And for some reason it works now.

I guess a regular restart after plugging it in last night didn't do the trick...I guess a full shut down worked *rolls my eyes* Oh well. Thanks for trying to help anyway. I'll mark as solved.

 

[Night Hawk]

You likely then saw a full boot and power up type fresh detection where Windows then saw it added in as a new hardware. Before that it wasn't fully detected and installed by Windows as it should have been. Sometimes a fast full restart won't work where once you power down and then power up fresh the bios as well as Windows performs a fresh new detection and zing! you are then in business!

 

[EugenesDIYDen]

Software/driver issues can cause problems with scrolling. The simplest initial solution though is to reset the mouse. Simply remove the battery and replace it, and also remove the USB dongle and reinsert (if the mouse is cordless). If a mouse isn't new and has been used extensively, the scroll wheel may be clogged with fluff and crumbs. The wheel is like a bicycle wheel with "spokes" and "slots". An infra red beam shines through the slots and is intermittently broken by the spokes. If the slots become blocked, the signal from the infra red detector becomes erratic resulting in a problem with scrolling.
I've written a guide to dismantling and cleaning the wheel which you can read here:

https://turbofuture.com/computers/Help-I-Cant-Scroll-With-My-Mouse