Mouse Without Borders and Windows 8 Consumer Preview

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!