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I recently bought a new mouse (a Logitech LX7), and the tilt wheel (left/right) doesn't work. I went to their website to install drivers, and halted when I saw the 60MB download...

Is there any way to get the tilt wheel to work without installing their bloated drivers?

Note: My only goal is to get the tilt wheel to work. I don't need to remap buttons, etc. There's already good software that can do that.

I broke down and tried to install the drivers, but they wouldn't install. I got an error during the installation of the VC++ redist, however my VC++ runtime is already up to date. I tried replacing the redist installer with a dummy EXE that reported success, but this didn't work either. So I'm back to square one looking for alternative drivers.

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install the bloated drivers then save the drivers only, restore your computer to return before your drivers install then reinstall the driver with the backup driver from double driver, mydrivers or any software like this and you will have the driver only without additional crap-softwares that you don't need ...

I do that for years to use wifi drivers on windows xp without the 3rd party network-manager that usualy come with it, game controllers and others !!!

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I should have figured that out... thanks! I'm gonna take it a step further and install the driver in a VM and extract it from there – zildjohn01 Nov 3 '09 at 22:16
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If you are concerned about the download size....I'm pretty sure that the 60MBytes is not the size of the specific driver but probably a majority is the GUI interface to set the options for the mouse driver (set button mapping, etc) proabably a bit for the install interface as well. Thus only a fraction of the download size is actually resident.

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My main problem is that generally hardware makers write crappy software. A quick google search revealed that Logitech is no exception. (click on "bloated" in my question) – zildjohn01 Aug 12 '09 at 22:53
For what it's worth, I use Logitech Setpoint and think it's about the best third-party driver I've ever seen. The interface is really very simple and functionality is limited to monitoring battery levels and mapping extra buttons. I wouldn't describe it as bloated at all. Also, you'll need Logitech's full software to use the Unifying functionality if you have a Unifying device. – jcrawfordor Jul 15 '12 at 20:18
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As the download is for any Logitech mouse it would contain graphics for all of them. The running driver (SetPoint.exe) is only using ~4MB Private Working Set, ~5MB Commit Size, and ~13MB Working Set on my machine.

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Fair enough, but Windows's built-in mouse driver has no resident EXE, and the 3 driver files are 52KB, 23KB, and 12KB. I will install Logitech's driver if I have to but I figured I would search for an alternative first. There's many cases where "better" drivers have been released for hardware when the official drivers were below par. – zildjohn01 Aug 12 '09 at 23:02

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