Mouse Smoothing Software

Assistive software for people with hand tremor.

Date Posted: March 9, 2004

Overview Requirements Download FAQs Forum Reviews 1. Are there any potential problems? 2. When I increase the smoothing value to reduce the effects of tremor, the mouse becomes sluggish. Why does this happen, and what should I do? 3. The installation program did not find a mouse to be smoothed. Or it seemed to work fine, but smoothing doesn't work. What's wrong? 4. How do I remove the Mouse Smoothing Software? 5. My mouse stopped working after I installed Mouse Smoothing Software on it. What do I do? 6. How do I contact the author? 1. Are there any potential problems? The main problem area concerns the regular mouse driver. Ordinarily, a set of mouse drivers comes with Windows, and an appropriate one is selected by Windows during installation. In some cases, a special mouse driver may have been installed to support a mouse with special features, such as a scrolling button. Our driver may fail to work with this driver, and in rare cases the mouse may even be disabled. This is definitely the case for Kensington mouse drivers. A second problem area concerns laptop computers. These have built-in pointing devices whose drivers can interact badly with our driver. We do not recommend installing our software on a laptop, with the exception of the IBM Thinkpad 570 or 600. Other IBM Thinkpads may work if they have a similar single Trackpoint pointing device, but we have not tested any. Do not install this software on an IBM laptop having an UltraNav pointing device (a combination of a Trackpoint and a Glidepad pointing device). Back to top 2. When I increase the smoothing value to reduce the effects of tremor, the mouse becomes sluggish. Why does this happen, and what should I do? Low-pass filters have an inherent time delay that increases as the filtering is increased. This slows the motion and interferes with eye-hand coordination, typically causing an overshoot when positioning the cursor. Use the smallest smoothing value that controls your tremor. Practice helps. Back to top 3. The installation program did not find a mouse to be smoothed. Or it seemed to work fine, but smoothing doesn't work. What's wrong? A non-standard mouse driver may have been installed, probably to support an advanced mouse with special features, or because it best fit the selection criteria that Windows uses when picking a driver. As noted above, some of these drivers do not appear to support and/or allow attachment of a filter driver. In most cases, these mice will work fine with one of the generic mouse drivers supplied by Microsoft. See the discussion on mouse drivers in Install.Doc for help with installing a generic driver. Back to top 4. How do I remove the Mouse Smoothing Software? You can remove most of the files as follows: Run the "Remove Smoothing" program, once per mouse. Make sure to remove smoothing from the PS2 mouse first, if applicable. Finally, reboot, even if a reboot is not required. Run the set-up program Setup.exe again. On the first screen, select the remove radio button and click on Next. This will remove the shortcuts and most of the set-up files. The directory C:\Program Files\IBM Research\SmoothingSetup\ may have to be erased manually. Locate and erase initmou.exe. This file is in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup. Locate and erase fm_cpl.cpl. This file is in C:\winnt\system32\ (Windows 2000) C:\windows\system32\ (Windows XP) Note that if the control panel has been opened, the control panel files will be locked. In that case, you will have to reboot before you can erase the file. Locate and erase moufiltr.sys. This file is in C:\winnt\system32\drivers (Windows 2000) C:\windows\system32\drivers (Windows XP) There are some registry entries that are best left alone. There are some files with names of the form oemXX.inf, where XX is a number. The only ones that should be erased have the text "IBM Mouse Smoothing Filter" in them and are located in C:\winnt\inf (Windows 2000) C:\windows\inf (Windows XP) If you have an advanced mouse with special features, you may want to re-install its software. See Appendix III of Install.Doc, or use the original installation disk for the mouse, if you have it. Back to top 5. My mouse stopped working after I installed Mouse Smoothing Software on it. What do I do? There is probably a gross incompatibility with the mouse driver. The best strategy is to un-install all the drivers for the offending mouse, using Window's device manager, and then reboot. This is best done using a mouse, although you can use keyboard shortcuts if you know how. If the non-functional mouse is a PS2 mouse, plug a USB mouse into an unused USB jack. The plug-and-play software should install a driver for the mouse, which will then work in Step C below. If the non-functioning mouse is the USB mouse, unplug it and plug in a different model, or plug it into a different USB jack. Again, it should start working. Do not plug in the same model USB mouse into the same jack, because the plug-and-play software will probably restore the non-functioning software. Once you have a working mouse, double-click on My Computer, Control Panel, System, Hardware, Device Manager. From the device list, click on the + sign in front of Mice and other pointing devices to display a list of mice. Right-click on the non-functioning mouse (be careful to choose the right one!) and then click on Uninstall from the drop-down menu. A warning box will pop up. Use the working mouse to click on OK, then close down the open windows and reboot the computer. Back to top 6. How do I contact the author? Please post a note to the alphaWorks discussion forum. Back to top