The direction of your mouse wheel determines how the content on your screen moves as you scroll. By default, scrolling up moves the content up on the screen, and scrolling down moves the content down.
Windows uses reverse scrolling, where the content moves down when you scroll up.
There are two types of scrolling available in Windows: Reverse and Natural.
With Reverse Scrolling, when you roll the mouse wheel backward, the scroll bar moves down while the page scrolls up. When you roll the mouse wheel forward, the scroll bar moves up while the page scrolls down.
With Natural Scrolling, when you roll the mouse wheel backwards, the scroll bar moves down as the page scrolls down. When you roll the mouse wheel forward, the scroll bar moves up as the page scrolls up.
Change scroll direction of the mouse wheel in Windows 11 or 10
You can change the scroll direction. This requires an adjustment in the Windows registry. I recommend you do one first create a restore point before continuing.
To get started, we first need the VID code of your mouse. VID code, or Vendor ID code, is a unique identification code assigned to hardware manufacturers. This code is used to identify the manufacturer of the device. We can retrieve this information from Device Manager.
Open device manager. Then click on “Mice and other pointing devices”. After this, right-click on your mouse (commonly called HID compatible mouse).
Click on the “Details” tab and select “Path to Device Instance” from the list. Then right-click on the VID “value” and write down the VID code.
Now open the Windows registry. Go to key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\HID\
Now look for the VID code that matches the VID code from Device Manager.
Open this VID value in the registry and go to “Device parameters”. Double click on the “FlipFlopWheel” value and change the value to “1” for natural scrolling or to “0” which is default – for reverse scrolling.
Note: see at the top of the accompanying text what natural or reverse scrolling also entails.
Restart your computer for the changes to take effect. I hope this helped you. Thank you for reading!