Sony Vaio touchpad with circular scroll and back/forward in Firefox

I finally got around to fixing the back/forward functionality in Firefox. I could have just modified the original Sony touchpad driver, but in the process I used Dell’s driver and got circular scrolling too!

Anyway, I googled this before and couldn’t get it working. The problem was that the posts did not explicitly say what to do. Here’s what to do explicitly.

What to do:

Assuming the driver is already installed, download a hex editor (like xvi32). In the hex editor, open …/DellTPad/Apoint.exe and search for “Netscape”. A note for Vista users, you need to right-click xvi32 and run as Administrator to edit any files in the Program Files directory.

Edit Netscape to “_Firefox” , the _ MUST be a space character, so you need to edit the HEX value of _.

If you use xvi32, in the left pane, select the position of _ and enter “20” or similarly, you could just press the space bar in the right pane as well.

When you’re done it should look like this.


I also have uploaded an install with the pre-modified apoint.exe –

http://rapidshare.com/files/169566570/touchpad.zip.html

For front/back feature in Firefox using the Dell driver, a little registry modification is required. Instructions by pyr0000 taken from http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=308940.

look for “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Alps\APoint”
with in that folder look for “UseCustomGUI”
double click and change the value data to “0”
close regedit
open mouse properties and you will have all the features unlocked. circle scrolling are within the dell tab and the back/forward is under gestures tab.

Also, in Vista, I found that the when the cursor changes during scrolling, it kills the Vista cursor animations. So I just disabled the change of cursor by changing CursorChangeType to 0.

If the mouse properties don’t show up properly, kill and restart ApMsgFwd.exe, ApntEx.exe and Apoint.exe.

This entry was posted in alps, firefox, hex, sony, touchpad, vaio. Bookmark the permalink.

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