Ticklish Techs

I’m using a Lenovo laptop and I’m a big fan of the Trackpoint mouse replacement. That is this small red thing in the middle of the keyboard some notebooks are equipped with instead of a touchpad. In fact my notebook does not even has a touchpad.

You can use the Trackpoint for scrolling like a mouse wheel when pressing the middle button and moving the Trackpoint up or down. Everybody using it will know what I’m talking about, anybody else does not need to read to the end.

But in some applications the scrolling does not work at all what is very annoying. I had the most trouble with Thunderbird and iTunes – just no scrolling.

And here is a fix for that issue. There is a file (C:\Program Files\Lenovo\ TrackPoint\tp4table.dat) on your machine when you have installed the Trackpoint software from Lenovo. Just edit that file and add some additional rows for the application with broken scrolling.

; Apple ITunes
*,*,itunes.exe,*,*,*,WheelStd,0,9

; Mozilla Thunderbird
*,*,thunderbird.exe,*,*,*,WheelStd,0,9

Remember to open the file with an editor as Administrator otherwise it would not work. I had to reboot my machine after that change. I just tested this change on a Windows 7 64 bit machine but it should work on 32 bit or other versions of Windows as well. Maybe the same fix applies also to non-Lenovo notebooks but I cannot tell. If someone out there tested it, please comment.

More on this topic and templates for some more applications (Picasa, Safar, Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Writer) can be found at http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/X-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/Fixing-Trackpoint-Scroll-for-ITunes-Picasa-Safari-Windows-Live/m-p/124378