Windows Vista Annoyances

Mouse Makeover

If your fondness for the standard Windows arrow cursor begins to wane, you can assert your individuality by choosing a different pointer shape. For starters, you might want to choose a bigger arrow cursor—a great solution on today’s tinier-pixel, shrunken-cursor monitors.

Begin by right-clicking the desktop and, from the shortcut menu, choosing Personalize. In the dialog box, click Mouse Pointers. You arrive at the dialog box shown in Figure 5-6.

Figure 5-6. Ever lose your mouse pointer while working on a laptop with a dim screen? Maybe pointer trails could help. Or have you ever worked on a desktop computer with a mouse pointer that seems to take forever to move across the desktop? Try increasing the pointer speed.

At this point, you can proceed in any of three ways:

• ▸ Scheme. Windows has many more cursors than the arrow pointer. At various times, you may also see the spinning circular cursor (which means, “Wait; I’m thinking,” or “Wait; I’ve crashed”), the I-beam cursor (which appears when you’re editing text), the little pointing-finger hand made famous by Microsoft’s advertising (which appears when you point to a Web page link), and so on.

  All of these cursors come prepackaged into design-coordinated sets called schemes. To look over the cursor shapes in a different scheme, use the Scheme drop-down list; the corresponding pointer collection appears in the Customize list ...