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Microsoft Admits Windows 8.1 Update May Bork Your Mouse, Promises a Fix
MojoKid writes "Microsoft has several valid reasons why you should upgrade to Windows 8.1, which is free if you already own Windows 8. However, there's a known issue that might give some gamers pause before clicking through in the Windows Store. There have been complaints of mouse problems after applying the Windows 8.1 update, most of which have been related to lag in video games, though Microsoft confirmed there are other potential quirks. Acknowledging the problem, Microsoft says it's also actively investigating the issues and working on a patch."
It's all borked..please be sure to fix the scroll button, too. The scroll speed is different each time i log in!!
Wow just wow now what enterprise app will get messed up with other stuff in windows 8 / 8.1 that was not tested before updates?
What are these reasons? I'm being serious. I have yet to see a reason to upgrade from Windows 7 this soon in the game
And give me the ability to hide that stupid "Secure Boot isn't configured correctly" watermark sitting on my desktop! I have it turned off for a reason, I don't need to be harassed constantly about it.
I guess that's one way to get people to use the Metro touch interface.
SteelSeries mouse drivers will cause the Windows 8.1 upgrade to fail.
Microsoft really screwed something up with the Windows 8.1 mouse drivers. They really need to get this fixed.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
It's a simple fix... they added some new mouse settings that cause the mouse to stop working while typing with a small delay... the settings are buried in the metro UI.... here is how to fix it: 1. Go to the windows setting in the metro UI, for me I just put my mouse pointer in the upper right of the screen until the "search, share, start, device, settings" pop up appears, click the settings icon. 2. click on the change PC settings at the bottom. 3. Click on PC and devices. 4. click on mouse and touch pad 5. under the touch pad settings set the delay to no delay.
...is to install Windows 7.
Assuming there's driver support.
In Soviet Russia, dot slashes YOU!
I installed 8.1 and the first two things I noticed- 1) it reset my icon size to medium, which on my 2560x1440 monitor looks ridiculous and given how they imported all my other settings... why? and 2) the HDMI output of my motherboard stopped working. After installing 8.1, I did some searching and apparently Sandy Bridge was not included in Intel's beta driver development for graphics for 8.1 and there is no known development being done for Sandy Bridge, so if I want to continue using my computer to communicate via the HDMI port to my television I need to upgrade to an Ivy Bridge, drive my 'small' 2nd monitor off of VGA (no fscking way, but supposedly analog ports off of S.B. are working fine- I haven't tested it), or upgrade my video card to one that can drive a 3rd (non-DP) monitor. Yes, I could also switch my DVI 2nd monitor to the mobo and put my TV into the HDMI on my video card, but that causes some really strange window relocation issues when waking out of sleep- I have tried that in the past.
For people using only on-board video via HDMI to their sole monitor and without a desire to upgrade S.B. or buy a new computer, it must be enraging. I guess I am lucky, upgrading this motherboard (ASRock Extreme4 Gen3) to Ivy Bridge was something I was planning to do this month, anyway. For Intel not to include Sandy Bridge, a chip only about 2 years old, in their driver development for 8.1 is pretty lame. A Microsoft suggestion was to reinstall the Intel video drivers with compatibility settings for Win 7 or 8, but that didn't work for me.
There's a patch here which fixes it, also speeds up your computer and makes it look a lot better.
I worked at a place where a big piece of production code, a 17 year-old MS-DOS application likely written in C or assembler, was nowhere to be found. The executable form was copied and used at least 10 times a day to ship product, and yet nobody knew where the actual code was.
More disturbingly, that same place had implemented FPGA code which was programmed at the board-house, and one of the internal reasons for the big push to our latest product is that nobody now in the company understands that FPGA code, and yet as with the example before those things are used on a daily basis in a production environment. That company is a division of a big and instantly-recognizable name in technology.
One company I worked for that makes optical transceivers for your big-name optical switches/routers/etc. like Juniper used Excel as a database. No shit. The manufacturing test "database" was just one goddamn Excel spreadsheet written to by VB over Labview. I distinctly remember having to manually redraw the border lines to keep up with the resizing of the spreadsheet due to test data constantly being written to the spreadsheet.
And those aren't even the worst of my stories. And I'm just a lowly technician.
-- Ethanol-fueled
I just want you guys to know that as a developer I have been debugging what I believe to be the side effects resulting from these changes all week. It's not just "mouse co-ordinates" that are affected, you have some very common APIs scaling window co-ordinates in totally unexpected and inconsistent ways now. You have totally broken certain application behaviors, and only in 8.1, and while I found a workaround for my use case I can also see that the workaround I'm using will break more things for others.
Next time you ask yourselves, "should we make these APIs suddenly behave differently than in all older versions of the OS?" there should be a very, very high barrier to saying yes, especially for a service pack release.
I hated that. At least you could easily skip it in the original Windows 8 setup. The other solution is to disable network connectivity, it then will let you skip creation of a Microsoft account.
It's probably the most underhanded way I've ever seen to try and herd people into your services.
still released it that way in spite of the problems. Arrogance is the only logical explanation.
This has been a well documented problem from earlier preview builds and was specifically not fixed in the RTM code because... well because MS seems to think it can make unilaterally bad UI decisions again and again and get away with it.
Try setting your Win8.1 display to 150% on a 1920x1200 monitor. This is exactly where I've used WinXP, WinVista, Win7 and Win8, yet in Win8.1, a random assortment of applications (including many MS utilities and 3rd-party programs) deliver barely readable fuzzy characters. At least in Win8.0, you could set a master switch to tell the OS to disable DPI scaling, but in their infinite wisdom, some group within MS decided that to hell with useability, they're going to simply remove the master switch and force ALL users to disable DPI scaling on an app by app basis, making it bloody well a gargantuan effort to avoid either fuzzy or tiny text.
It's absolutely appalling... About as appalling as MS deciding that Win8.0 users shouldn't be able to boot into desktop mode on a non-touchscreen device and then completely removing the start menu as if giving the middle finger to the existing install base was some kind of magical shortcut back to a dominant market position.
If you're arrogant, but generally make good or at least non-destructive UI decisions, most people will forgive you. When you're arrogant and make butthead UI decisions, well, then you're MS.
They've managed to marry Apple's arrogance with butthead UI decisions.
Why bother fixing it? Just censor the problem like the other fruity company.
You're right, I never heard about Apple censoring their OS screwing up mice. They really censored that pretty well.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I was OK with 8.0. I've reached the point where I hate the new versions of everything (except maybe XFCE, which is pretty much pitched toward people who hate the new versions of everything). The reason is all this struggle to revolutionize the user experience seems to have left the goals of making common tasks convenient for the user behind. Impressive but pointless seems to be à la mode these days, and designers appear increasingly incapable of distinguishing creativity from novelty.
But given that virtually everybody has caught this disease, I pretty much have given up on insisting that things making sense. I only ask for a few things, that a user interface be stable and respond consistently (consistency was a huge problem with Vista), and that I can figure out how to do what I need done after a few days with the system. Windows 8.0 fit the bill. It didn't make much *sense*, but it didn't crash and responded in a stable way so I simply adjusted to its quirks.
Windows 8.1 doesn't fit the bill, because it doesn't respond consistently; it brings back some of the Vista experience of having the OS throw unpredictable little delays into your work. The file manager windows are especially bad (e.g. when you're ejecting a drive). How in Hades' name could someone screw up something like that in 2013?
And the 8.0 to 8.1 upgrade process was terrible. It was so poorly designed from an HCI standpoint that I was actually tempted to believe it was an abusive prank by a disgruntled MS employee.
MS these days is looking to ever more like Lotus Software in its declining days. Despite being located in city crowded with world class universities, Lotus seemed utterly incapable of addressing even basic user interface problems except by pasting cheery looking wallpaper over them. I used to reflect when I passed their headquarters on Land Boulevard that if they put up a billboard say "We'll pay $100,000 to anyone who can fix our stupid UI problems," probably twenty or thirty people a day would see it who could probably take them up on the offer.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
keyboard still needed for typing / coding.
I don't see any big typing work being done on a keyboard.
This update breaks mouse in GAMES.
So your update breaks games entirely. A pretty steep downgrade.
I'd grab a bean bag one :D