If you’re unable to use the mouse scroll wheel in Windows 10 Start menu All Apps list, this has to do with the “Scroll inactive windows” Mouse setting.
When you click Start, the Start menu All apps list appears by default (since the Anniversary Update) but focus is not set to the All Apps list view/box control automatically, unless you right-click on an item or drag the All Apps scroll bar down.
To be able to scroll through the All Apps listing without first setting the focus on it, you need to enable a feature where you can scroll inactive windows or UI elements simply by hovering the mouse pointer over them.
Scroll inactive windows when you hover over them
Open Settings (WinKey + i), type “mouse”. Click “Mouse & touchpad settings”.
Enable “Scroll inactive windows when I hover over them”
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Thank you.
That has been annoying me since last windows update.
Makes perfect sense when you give a simple answer. Microsoft forums are like digging through treacle so really appreciate simple straightforward info.
With e, the opposite. My Start was crashing when I scrolled All Apps. I turned my “Scroll inactive…” switch to OFF. THAT solved my problem. Thanks for pushing me in the right direction.
I couldn’t figure this out for the longest time, Im able to scroll inactive windows so I assumed it was turned on. Turns out since I use altdrag it overrides scroll inactive with it’s own setting and disallows scrolling in the settings app.
Just incase anyone has hooks from other programs, might be good to check through them if this fix doenst work.
Thank you for this… also using altdrag. Read this, opened settings, sure enough “Scroll inactive windows” is under “General settings”. Switched that off and it fell back to the Windows setting. Scrolling now works! Maybe there is a bug in AltDrag.
you just saved the life of my laptop, it appreciates it.
Doesn’t fix my the issue on my Lenovo Ideapad 110s.
Mine is turned on but it still doesn’t scroll. Apps i installed from microsoft store desn’t scroll too. Apps like settings, groove music and any microsoft app doesn’t scroll despite the scroll inactive windows when i hover over it switch being turned on. My laptop is HP elitebook 8540w. Please help.
Brilliantly simple, settings/devices/mouse/bingo. best thing that’s happend to me all day CHEERS! mate. was doing my head in. My game (FO4) would not start after latest win10 update and ended up having to reinstall windows 🙁 . Backups then were NOT accessible so its beeeeeen haaaard. sorry cant share, bar word of mouth as not twiddler or fiddler etc. but will be on your site if any more probs develope.
This has got to be the dumbest “feature” I have ever seen.
Did they not imagine that somebody would just click on the start menu and want to scroll through the programs?
Is Microsoft full of morons who think that when you click on the start menu you perhaps wants to use a different program while that start menu is just sitting there open?
This is why Apple always has better interfaces on their software then Microsoft, they actually think about these little details and how they affect the users.