Invert scroll wheel direction in Windows

When I first installed Mac OS X Lion I had a bit of a struggle accepting that the scroll direction was inverted. But I gave it a chance and soon realized that the “new” way of scrolling felt much more natural, the pages are scrolled by pulling the page down and not the scrollbar – just like on a smart phone or tablet. Getting used to it have a backside though, it gets confused again when working in Windows where the scroll isn’t inverted. Windows doesn’t have any GUI to change the scroll direction, but it’s a pretty simple change in the registry to change it.

Browse the key “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\HID\”:

Here you will find a collection of keys named something like “VID_xxxx&PID_xxxx”.Each key contains settings for different input devices. To find out which key contains settings for your mouse, open the device manager and check the properties for the mouse. In the Information tab select Hardware-ID and a list of IDs will show – and one of these has the same name as the key you are looking for in the registry. Now expand that key and go through all subkeys and look for a leaf node key called “Device Parameters”. Look for the attribute “FlipFlopWheel” and change the value from 0 (default) to 1. Reboot might be necessary.