Is your Mouse Draggin’ in Vista running in VMWare?
I’ve been testing software using 64-bit Windows Vista Ultimate Edition running in VMWare 6 on a Dell 64-bit server. I connect to the server using Remote Desktop, logon to my account, run VMWare, and start the Vista virtual machine. My problem is that with this setup the mouse in Vista is very draggy and quite annoying to use. This is the behavior that you would expect when running a remote access application over a low-bandwidth, high-latency network connection. But I’m running on a gigabit LAN and connecting to a server in the next room! What gives?
It turns out that poor mouse performance is yet another reason to turn off Vista’s Aero “visual experience” feature. Aero is such a drag on Vista’s performance that in my testing environment it even affects the mouse. Aero can be easily disabled by changing the Windows color scheme, but all I wanted was to fix was the mouse. The following procedure is how to fix it without completely disabling Aero:
- Open the Mouse applet in Control Panel
- Select the Pointers tab
- Set the Scheme to (None)
- Uncheck Enable pointer shadow
- Click the OK button
You should notice that the mouse now moves smoothly and behaves normally.
Apparently one of the many help messages displayed by VMWare 6 when starting a virtual machine describes this exact problem and solution. But in my haste to start testing I simply dismissed all of these messages without reading them. Maybe one day soon I’ll blog about the other good things that VMWare 6 is trying to tell me too.
