Apple's Magic Mouse on Windows 7

Posted by Stephan Kristyn on February 3rd, 2010 / No Comments

Windows offers a vast universe of Software and extended configurability and Apple produces excellent Hardware. Why not combine best of both worlds? Or like a collegue put it, Apple does not manufacture hardware but fitments or design objects for our home. The magic mouse indeed is the biggest revolution in mouse history since the optical mouse.

Of course everybody would tell you, this wouldn’t work and the Apple Specialist at the Apple Store would tell you that you are out of luck or at least out of support. Blabla. Luckily we are not out of basic IT skills.Here it goes

1. Buy the Magic Mouse

2. Install the drivers from the guys over at Uneasy Silence

3. Pair the mouse with your bluetooth dongle. It’ll work with Microsoft’s Bluetooth Stack.

4. Install SmoothWheel for Firefox. Sadly I didn’t find a proper solution for IE8.

In SmoothWheel alter these settings:

Step Size: 1/10 page

Speed: Normal (0.4 sec)

Adaptive-Step: Extreme (x10)

Adaptive-Duration: (x1.5)

There you got it – almost perfect Apple feeling on your PC.

But only almost ! Because I encountered a lot of annoying problems. Occasional drop outs of connection, horizontal scrolling isn’t smooth and only time will tell if battery sleep mode is working like on a Mac. This was tested with a broadcom bluetooth chip by DELL. I also failed to pair the mouse with a bleeding edge Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR Dongle by Trust. Long story short, I wouldn’t yet use the magic mouse with a non-OSX. I might be testing again if Apple adds official Bootcamp support to the mouse.