WizMouse

Tiny New Zealand is an up-and-comer in the global tech industry, and Antibody Software's WizMouse is one of the first commercial software products we've encountered from the island nation known for its digital cinematic capabilities. It's a small bit of freeware that lets you use your mouse's scroll wheel to scroll through the window currently under the mouse pointer instead of the top focused or "active" window. Instead of having to click the mouse on the inactive window to enable scrolling, you merely have to position the cursor over the window to focus it. You can also use WizMouse to enable similar scrolling functionality in applications that don't support mouse wheels.

At a little more than 571KB, including an installer, WizMouse is a compact program that downloads and sets up quickly and easily. Since it's designed to do one simple thing, or not, as you choose, its controls and options are appropriately basic, just a dialog with typical options such as running at start-up, enabling or disabling the program quickly with a left-click of the system tray icon, and selecting how many lines to scroll with each turn of the mouse wheel. There's also a check box for the function that converts mouse wheel commands into scrollbar commands, with advice to disable it, should it cause erratic mouse scrolling. Web-based help is a click away.

WizMouse is freeware and works in all versions of Windows, from 2000 to 7. Recent releases have a "Run as Administrator" option for Windows Vista and 7.