AlwaysMouseWheel

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on April 25, 2012

Sometimes little tweaks can make a big difference, and that's definitely the case with AlwaysMouseWheel. This little utility allows you to scroll in windows that aren't active using your mouse wheel. It might not seem like a big deal, but it's a surprisingly useful feature to have when you do a lot of work that involves switching between windows.

The program's interface is no-nonsense; with radio buttons you select whether you want the program to bring the selected window to the front using the mouse wheel or just scroll the selected window while leaving it in the background. If you need to refer to something in one window while typing into another, this is an incredibly useful thing to be able to do.

There are check boxes to enable and disable AlwaysMouseWheel and select whether or not it will run on startup. The interface minimizes to the system tray when not in use, making it easy to access when you need to make a change. That's really all there is to it; there are no other features and no documentation.

AlwaysMouseWheel comes as a ZIP file and is accessible after extraction with no need for installation; this means you can easily take it along on a USB drive and use it when troubleshooting and performing many other tasks. We think anyone who typically has multiple windows open at once will find AlwaysMouseWheel surprisingly useful.