I absolutely love my Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000.  It’s a small Bluetooth mouse and my MacBook has built-in Bluetooth so I have a nice travel mouse with no dongle!  It was working fine on Vista using BootCamp.  This week I decided to repave the MacBook and tried to get the mouse working on OS X.  I got nowhere using the normal Bluetooth device discovery technique in OS X.  The computer could see the mouse but it repeatedly failed to pair.

I finally found a technique in a forum that worked for me:

  1. Turn on the mouse
  2. Press or hold down connect button until light flashes alternating red and green
  3. Click Bluetooth tray icon; Browse Device…
  4. If the device “Mouse” is not in the list click search, then click browse.
  5. Next to search button it will say “Device does not have the necessary services.”
  6. Click Cancel; Quit Bluetooth File Exchange
  7. Open System Preferences; Bluetooth; Devices section
  8. Settings section; Click the device ID in the list of your mouse, Add to Favorites
  9. Turn Bluetooth Off, Turn Bluetooth On
  10. Light should stop blinking and the device will show up with status “Connected: Yes” in bluetooth device list.

(big thanks to macrumors user viper0440)

I also installed the latest IntelliPoint software for Mac OS X, which let me configure the pointer speed and reprogram the side buttons (one to open Dashboard and the other Expose).
Why did I repave my MacBook?  I’ve been hearing great things about VMware Fusion.  VMware Fusion lets you run Windows in a virtual machine on Mac OS X.  It is the VMware equivalent of Parallels.  I’ve been anxious to try it.  It is supposed to boot a BootCamp partition but I kept getting a “Raw Disk Creation Failed” error message so I decided to start from scratch.  It’s working great with a virtual hard disk.