Windows 8.1 Login Mouse Sensitivity Speed

When using Windows 8.1 and possibly Windows 8, on the Login screen when selecting the user to Sign In as, your mouse will be much quicker (or slower) than you have set for your Computers / users preference. This is because the mouse settings are stored on a Per User Basis and there is no normal graphical method to modify the Global Mouse Settings. Because of this, I dug through the registry for a few minutes and figured out how to modify these settings.

I was so annoyed over this, even though I only see this screen for a few seconds a day, that I found a way to resolve this issue. I hope in the future Microsoft will start adding GUI settings in the Control Panel to modify global settings and not just for specific users, if you are an administrator. But in the mean time, I’m just glad that made this value dynamic and not hard coded into a file.

This tutorial requires that you know the basics of working in Regedit. Regedit is fairly simple to use as long as you are careful and don’t delete anything or modify anything you are unsure of.

Adjusting Global Mouse Settings

1. Open up “regedit” or the Registry Editor. You can do this by [Windows Key] + R and then typing “regedit”. This program requires an administrator account.
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Control Panel \ Mouse
3. You will want to take note or just remember the following values. The “data” for MouseSensitivity and MouseSpeed. The others may play some sort of affect, but I have not needed to modify them.
4. Navigate to HKEY_USERS \ .DEFAULT \ Control Panel \ Mouse
5. For the above values you remembered, double click on the Name, such as MouseSpeed. You can now modify the value. I have MouseSpeed to 0 and MouseSensitivity to 6. The defaults are 1 and 10.

Now just close out of the Registry and sign out. You should notice your mouse speed is much slower (or faster) now on that screen and will not be such a drastic speed difference.