One of the more annoying things about dialog boxes when you need to confirm or click OK, is that you never know where on the Desktop it will appear. Sometimes it is close to where the mouse pointer is, or sometimes it ends up at the other end if the screen. And sometimes it's anyone guess where it will appear when you need to confirm multiple dialog boxes in succession.
To help take the guess work out of where the dialog box will appear, you can configure the mouse pointer in Windows XP and Vista to land on the default button in the dialog box, allowing for easy access to confirm or click OK.
To configure this setting:
- in Vista, open the Control Panel by clicking on the Start button in Vista, and type mouse in the search box, then click on Mouse in the search results to open the Mouse properties.
- in XP, click on Start \ Settings \ Control Panel and click on Mouse to open the Mouse properties.
Select the Pointer Options tab, then select the check box next to "Automatically move pointer to the default button in a dialog box". Click OK to save the setting and close the mouse property window.
NOTE: screen shot is from Windows Vista. Settings will be similar in Windows XP
Now when you need to click OK, or confirm a question in a dialog box, the mouse pointer will snap (move) to the default button, waiting for you to click or move to another button in the dialog box.
Comments on Windows Tip: Automatically Move Mouse Pointer To Default Button In Dialog Boxes
All the reasons given above for checking the box to turn ON the automatic positioning of the pointer on the OK Button of a dialog box are important. But the MOST IMPORTANT reason for doing so in my view, Is that occasionally the very dialog box that you need to click on in order to move on to the next TASK, may be obscured or behind another window or flash screen which you are unable to see in order to move the pointer to close that dialog box so that you can move on to the next task. IN SUCH CASES, all you need to do is PRESS the RETURN BUTTON as the pointer will already be positioned on the default button to close itself (ususually the OK button) BEHIND THE WINDOW THAT IS OBSCURING THE VIEW OF THAT DIALOG BOX…Whew!…that was a long explaination. Hope I didn't lose you!