Thursday, April 26, 2007

Configuring IBM ThinkPad's TrackPoint middle button



If you are a fan of a ThinkPad notebook like I am, you would know that they come with old school TrackPoint mouse system, something I referred to as the "nipple" when I first used it ten years ago. As I am a TrackPoint veteran having played with them on selected Toshiba notebooks, so it worked well with me.

The thing about the TrackPoint is there are three buttons for it. The usual left and right are there but also a light blue middle button which the previous owner does not know what it does. I believe IBM calls it the scroll button, but it is a mainly disabled button for most part of this decade. Apparently. It used to work well in applications like MS Office and IE, but is now 'broken' due to it being not supported by newer versions of those software. It does not work with Firefox 2.x as well as the new IE 7.

Here's a tip that I swiped off jdavidb, download Logitech's Mouseware if you have any intentions of using the TrackPoint's middle button. After rebooting Windows XP, the Mouseware application would allow you to configure the middle button to do almost anything, including scrolling if you wish. As a person who missed the Windows button on the IBM keyboard (it doesn't have that until Lenovo changed the policy recently), I configured the middle button to launch the start button. Yay.

3 comments:

tokyo_nights said...

I've an old IBM Thinkpad over at the office and I usually call the "nipple" as the "eraser head"

Jon Choo said...

We always called it the nipple, though I have heard about the eraser head. The new caps has a more 'nipply' feel to it...

Brighton said...

That is a nice theme! Where can I download it?