Mouse speed related cursor movement

When I bought my MacBook some weeks back I first thought that my mouse pad had some kind of error. This since the mouse movement seemed to be erratic and random. But since the problem was the exact same when i connected an external mouse I looked into the problem deeper. What I have learned is this.

Apparently the mouse driver in mac has a speed proportion feature. if the mouse is moved slow over a distance of 10cm the cursor moves a shorter distance than if the mouse is moved fast over a distance of 10cm.

This for me is highly counterintuitive usually resulting in me starting to move the mouse slow to move it a short distance however, after a short time since the cursor don't reach as far as I expect i will start accelerating the mouse hence overshooting the target by a mile. At first I thought that i would adapt to this given some time, but since this is very counterintuitive for me it the problem is actually growing worse. I think the reason for this is that i usually only use small movements when using my mouse, for instance on my desktop computer moving the cursor from the extreme lower left corner to the extreme upper right corner is a distance of only 2.5 cm for the mouse.

The distance is the same for my MacBook but only if i use the mouse in fast jerky movements, which is quit annoying to do and also screws up my usually impeccable cursor accuracy. If I move the mouse at my usual speed the cursor will move only a fraction of the distance wanted.

Sorry for the annoyingly long intro to the question...

So my question is if it still only is possible to remove this Mouse speed related Cursor movement by using third party mouse drivers. And if so which ones can you recommend to me?

This is a question that has been asked before on the following topic address: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=797297

but I am bringing it up again since i don't feel that it has actually been resolved. It has been almost 6 months since that topic was opened (5 months since last answer) so perhaps there has been some development within the area.

Thanks in advance
Best regards Mikael

MacBook 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 2GB 667 MHz DDR2 Mac OS X (10.4.10)

Posted on Jul 12, 2007 3:33 AM

Reply
3 replies

Sep 21, 2007 12:19 AM in response to tranquillity

I think it is absolutely ridiculous that apple does not allow you to turn off acceleration. I've googled and there are many many people ****** off about this and I can tell you it has gotten me so frustrated I've hit things.

There are supposed to be a few solutions and I've tried them all. There's a program called MouseFix that is supposed to let you turn off acceleration, but as far as I can tell it just changes the mouse speed. If you give it a really low number the mouse moves really slowly, but the acceleration is definitely still there. This is the one everybody is giving as the answer, but I don't get it. It doesn't change the acceleration one bit, just the speed. There's also MouseZoom, which has been around for a long time and I've read a number of posts saying its the answer to the acceleration problems, but it also just changes the speed, not the acceleration.

People say logitech and microsoft mice work because their drivers override Apple's crappy ones. I have a logitech mouse and I've gotten the logitech control center, but there's nothing in there about pointer settings - only clicking options and scroll wheel speed. I used to have a Microsoft mouse and after installing the Microsoft IntelliPoint driver/control panel it FINALLY fixed the problem. But I've recently lost that microsoft mouse and now I'm back to square one.

There are also two commercial programs that let you customize the mouse, but I'm not going to pay $20 just to get an effing check box that lets me disable the effing acceleration.

APPLE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD JUST LET US TURN OFF THE ACCELERATION. I'm a laid back person but you're driving me insane and I just can't take it anymore.

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Mouse speed related cursor movement

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