VMWare Workstation

[JimFoye]

I had not upgraded my SmartNav software for a year (or perhaps longer). Yesterday I upgraded to 3.2.30. One thing I noticed right away is that the mouse cursor behaves differently now inside a virtual machine. For example, I can select lines of text, but the text doesn't highlight as I drag the cursor, it only highlights when I release the mouse button. If I click on a menu, the highlight bar doesn't track the way it used to. When I come out of the VM, clicking may not work until I reach over to my real mouse and click with that first.

I use VMs a lot, and I was really pleased before that I didn't have any issues with SmartNav, now it looks like things will be bumpier. Is this something you could look into?

[VincentG]

I will foward onto the development team....

Have you tried a clean install of the SmartNAV software?

What are you using to preform clicking functions?

[JimFoye]

Yes, I did a clean install of 3.2.30.

What do you mean by "clicking functions"?

[VincentG]

Are you using a mouse?

Left and right keys, mapped within the SmartNAV software to the keyboard?

Are you using a foot switch?

Also what version of the SmartNAV software were you running?

Thanks
Vince

[JimFoye]

OK, I have a 3M ergonomic mouse (the one that looks like a joystick). That's my "hard mouse". But for clicking with SmartNav I use the clicker buttons which are velcroed on the sides of my keyboard. I use SmartNav about 70% of the time and the 3M mouse 30% of the time.

Again, I'm using of 3.2.30, is this the version you are looking for, or something else?

BTW, when the cursor is at work in the virtual machine, there is a hotkey combination to "release" it to the host operating system, ctrl-alt. If I press this, then the mouse gets released, more or less (see below). This isn't too bothersome, but with the previous version of SmartNav I usually didn't have to do this, I would just click on anything running outside the VM and things were fine.

This morning I have been pressing ctl-alt to release the mouse cursor. But one time after I did that, although I could click the cursor, my hotkeys (F9, etc.) stopped being recognized by SmartNav. So I had to close it and restart it. After that it recognized my hot keys.

So definitely there have been some behavorial changes in this version from what I had installed before (I don't remember that version), and not for the best. Maybe I should roll back to a prior version.

I am not totally sure of this, but it seems like there may be a slight improvement in responsiveness in this version as I move the mouse cursor closer to the edges of my monitors. I have dual monitors and they are separated by about 6", so responsiveness around the edges has always been not so great.

[VincentG]

Try the following version of the drivers, and see if it is having the same issues.

http://media.naturalpoint.com/software/ ... 20.028.exe

[JimFoye]

OK, I need to clarify something, because I just had the "no hotkey" functionality again. I just have to press ctl-alt to release the mouse from the virtual machine. So I think we're just talking about one "problem", which is, I have to explicitly release the mouse now, whereas I didn't before. Not the end of the world.

Ok, two problems. The cursor doesn't track well inside the vm, for example, selecting text (see my first post). Again, not the end of the world, but annoying.

I'll try the older version.

You guys might want to consider testing with virtual machines. This is becoming mainstream technology.

[JimFoye]

3.20.028

Sweet! This works beautifully with the vm.

[VincentG]

What VM are you using, what guest operating system, and whether you have any VM tools installed in the guest operating system (and if so which version)? Those would be useful for testing.

[JimFoye]

VMware Workstation 5.5.3 (which is latest version). Host operating system is WindowsXP, guest is Windows 2000. I have the latest VMWare tools installed on the guest.