Blender Interface problems

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
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Hi all, I’m a definite newb at Blender, only installed it on my laptop for the first time last week, did a couple of tutorials and slowly learning without too many problems. However, I then went to install Blender on some different laptops so that I could teach my newfound knowledge to my students, only to come across some issues on these other laptops. It first showed up when I tried to edit the values in the Transform Properties Panel. I can not SHIFT-LMB to highlight the values. Also clicking on the left/right scrolling arrows only works intermittently. I can, however lock and unlock the values without any problems.

After playing around for awhile, I’ve discovered that the behaviour of the mouse in general is dodgy. When moving the mouse over buttons or menu options they do not highlight as normal. Has anyone come across this before? Am I missing some extra component? I couldn’t see anywhere that there was anything special that Blender should require to run properly. I tried running from the portable version as well as the installation file, I am administrator and I even tried installing Python which I figured correctly had absolutely no impact on anything I was doing.

The laptops which it does not run correctly on are ACER Aspire 5715Z running XP. The laptop which works is a Fujitsu on XP too. I would appreciate any suggestions regarding what could be causing this.

Thanks

Alan.

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I can not SHIFT-LMB to highlight the values.
This can be a bit tricky sometimes, depends where you click and it’s not always exactly clear where to click. Try clicking on the slider a bit more on different places.

Also clicking on the left/right scrolling arrows only works intermittently
Don’t click, but hold the mouse button and then move the mouse left or right. Hold shift for more precise values and ctrl for exact values (or ctrl + shift for precise and exact values)

When moving the mouse over buttons or menu options they do not highlight as normal. Has anyone come across this before?
Yp, if Blender is not the active program on my taskbar, but it still shows up.

Of course, these problems might have a completely different cause. Perhaps the other laptop’s graphic cards have bad support for OpenGL (Blender’s UI is drawn entirely in OpenGL). One solution could be to update the drivers.

Oh, and Welcome :slight_smile:

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OpenGL appears to be the problem. Downloading updated drivers now. Will post results. Thx

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yep. updated drivers did the trick. nice one… for info - this was using an Intel 965 Express Chipset - apparently quite common for them to have OpenGL probs if using old drivers or drivers from Windows site.