Parallels Mouse Scroll Speed

Working in Parallels certainly has its quirks. It’s great to be able to get the smooth interface of Mac’s OSX and still be able to run those apps you just need Windows for (Visual Studio, SQL and other developer tools in my case.) But sometimes, little quirks can drive you mad! For a while now I’ve been lamenting how scroll speed worked inside of parallels. I was using a Microsoft wireless USB mouse which has a scroll wheel which “clicks” as it turns. Each click scrolls down a chunk of the screen. On the Mac side, scrolling was fairly smooth, although still it moved down in chunks. Recently I got, (christmas gift, thank’s to my wife ) a new Apple Magic Mouse. I was excited at the prospect of smoother scrolling! When scanning a long page I like to slowly creep down the page. When the page would jump in large chunks, you couldn’t keep scanning the page as you moved. The large move made you lose your place. OK so this sounds like a bit of a whiney type of complaint, but when you spend as much time as I do scanning over text and code, these little things start to matter! So I was happy to see mac applications have the smoothest scrolling from a mouse I’ve ever had. Wonderful! Then on to parallels. Smoother than before, but still pretty choppy. But then I found something that made things a lot better!

The Parallels Mouse Scroll Fix

Inside Windows, there’s an option that helps smooth the scrolling. This will work for all mice I imagine.

Start >> Control Panel >> Mouse (This path varies depending on your windows install)

Click over to the Wheel tab and there is an option to select the number of lines to jump on each scroll interval. Set it to 1, the lowest allowed. Mine was set to 3 by default (windows server 2003). Setting it down to 1 helped a LOT!