Ok, fed up of the problems with the other lappy so I bought a new one, cheap, last one at PC World.

Lenovo c205, 4gb Ram, 320gb HDD, 1.6ghz Dual Core.

Right, PC is pretty good once I got rid of the installed bloatware etc. until I plugged in a USB mouse which worked fine on my old Visa laptop.

It makes the "Duh Dah" sound as though its recognised it, the optical light on the bottom of the mouse is on.

Windows doesnt recognise the drivers and it has a yellow exclamation mark in the Human Interface Devices section. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling and it tried to download drivers from MS but says "Cannot install this driver, check with your manufacturer."

Its just a generic USB mouse from Advent (Retractible cable one, not Wireless) didnt need drivers last time.

I also tried a MS Scroll Optical USB mouse and its baulking when its trying to get the drivers for that too, fooked it off after 30 minutes of it trying to find it.

Any ideas whats going on? Could it be my synaptics touchpad interfering with it? Never had that installed on my last laptop.

Are there alternatives to Synaptics that allow scrolling with the outside of the touchpad?

If so do a fresh install back to factory from the ghost file on the hdd and all should be fine.

...disagree with all of this.

Is the mouse plug and play compatible with Windows7 or is it for vista and below? I would guess given what you've posted it isn't rated for win7, buy a new mouse. 6 quid from ebuyer.

http://www.ebuyer.com/231411-logitech-m195-wireless-mouse-usb-910-001998

The touchpad won't be interfering, it's boxed off from the OS. It's meant to work alongside mouse drivers when a compatible mouse is plugged in.

Its a 3 year old mouse, but surely Win 7 is backwards compatible?

I did a fresh install from the boot partition and its chock full of shitty bloatware apps that i dont need ooVoo etc.

Im tempted to do a fresh Win 7 Install off the DVD and just leave the partition as is just in case. For a 4gb system, the start up apps are draining a LOT of resources. Got rid of loads and its running great, albeit without a USB mouse.

have you tried pugging the Mouse into Different USB Ports?
I fight with the mouse in work daily lol

As a corrupted driver could cause similar.

Yeah, first thing i tried. Tried 2 different mice too.

microsoft mouse is compatible with all operating systems.

I've had mice that wouldn't run on a range of *nix installations.

Only reason I remember is using the keyboard based mice in *nix sucks even more than the windows one.

Done a fresh install of 7 minus the OEM bloatware and its working.