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Mouse Without Borders and Windows 8 Consumer Preview

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Mouse without Borders

I have blogged about using Mouse Without Borders before, but today after installing the Windows 8 Consumer Preview on my system I wanted to see if I could get Magic Mouse running. While the computer I installed it on has a basic touch screen, I wanted to put a mouse and keyboard on the device, but not clutter up my desk even more than it is. So…

The first thing I discovered is that Mouse Without Borders requires the .Net Framework 2.0. For those who have not yet discovered it, the .Net framework 2.0 is not enabled by default in Windows 8 CP. There are a few solutions to resolve this..

1: Using an installer that tries to download the .NET framework will trigger Windows 8 CP to try to enable the component automatically. It will likely require a download from Windows Update. This did not work for me, despite being connected to a wired network, it came up with an error trying to download the necessary files.

2: If you go to Control Panel.. Programs.. Get Programs  and select “Turn Windows Features on or off”, you will see the “.NET Framework 3.5 (include .NET 2.0 and 3.0)” listed, but disabled. Simply select the feature and Windows 8 will try to install the necessary components. This did not work for me, despite being connected to a wired network, it came up with an error trying to download the necessary files.

So, given the error message, I wondered if there was a way to download the files from the Internet, I pulled out my trusty install Flash Drive from my earlier post. That happens to have the necessary files on the drive.

3: To enable .NET Framework 3.5 using a Flash drive (or DVD):
Start a Command Prompt as an administrator (click the Start button and type CMD, right-click on cmd.exe and select “Run as administrator" and accept the UAC prompt, assuming you are using Windows Vista or Windows 7)
Run the following command in Bold followed by ENTER:

Dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:NetFX3 /All /Source:e:\sources\sxs /LimitAccess (note: the e: drive is the letter associated with the install DVD or Flash drive that contains the installation files)

If you need to, you can copy the source files (e:\sources\sxs\*.*) to the local hard drive and alter the /Source: parameter as appropriate.

Mouse Without Borders installed and worked wonderfully after that. Just remember to use the same version of the Mouse Without Borders software on all machines…

Enjoy!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Thanks, I will report the bug... out of interest what version of Mouse without Borders are you using (usually when you open the application settings, the version number is displayed on the title bar).

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    I tried this as well and it mostly works, however installing it appears to partially break the on-screen keyboard.  You can still bring it up and type, but the key in the lower right corner that normally allows you to switch to different input options (handwriting, other keyboard layouts like the split screen one) or dismiss the keyboard is blank and pressing it no longer displays the list of layouts.  It makes Mouse Without Borders more-or-less useless on tablets because you'll be locked into one keyboard.  I really hope that a new version is released which does not break this as MWB is a pretty ideal way to supply a keyboard to a tablet.

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 27, 2012
    The comment has been removed