Usually you have to click on an inactive window and bring it to the focus before you can do mouse scrolling with your mouse wheel. But thanks to the freeware WizMouse, now you can scroll a window without bringing it into focus first. When WizMouse is running, your mouse wheel input is sent to a window which is under the mouse cursor – no matter whether it is inactive or in foreground.
WizMouse, when active, sends all the mouse wheel commands to the window under the mouse pointer instead of the foreground window. This eliminates the need of clicking on a window to bring it to focus first. It can also enable the use of mouse wheel in applications without mouse wheel support.
You can download the WizMouse from the Antibody Software website. The download is available both as a setup installer and as portable application. I always prefer portable applications as they leave little fingerprint on the system. If you download the portable version, you can extract the contents of the ZIP archive and run WizMouse.exe from there. It would place an icon in the Windows notification area. You can right-click on this notification area icon and choose to enable/disable the WizMouse as well as open its settings.
In the configuration window, you would find many unusual and surprising options like reversing the scroll direction (as you scroll down, it actually scrolls up), automatically bringing the scrolling window to foreground, re-hooking the mouse capture when its lost, enabling the mouse wheel support for applications which do not really process the wheel scroll messages and more.
WizMouse is a nifty little application that can make the life of a Windows user a little bit easier by adding mouse wheel support in all the applications through some strange hacks. It can also send the mouse scroll signals to the windows that are not in focus. If you have an old application that does not respond to the mouse wheel scrolling, then you should definitely try the WizMouse and see if it works for that application.
You can download WizMouse Lite from http://antibody-software.com/