virtualbox.org

I've noticed that whenever I create a new guest, the pointing device is set to USB Tablet as default. What is the reasoning behind this? Is there any benefit over emulating a traditional PS/2 mouse, especially for older operating systems? This question isn't of any pressing importance but just to satisfy my own curiosity.

Edit: I've read this section of the manual, but I'm still unclear on what the difference is in regard to what the guest sees: https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch01. ... use_normal

Are you sure about the keyboard and mouse being set to USB tablet by default? Because that is not what's happening. Try to set a Windows NT 4 client for example. The USB mouse is selected by default in clients that are USB aware.

socratis wrote:Are you sure about the keyboard and mouse being set to USB tablet by default? Because that is not what's happening. Try to set a Windows NT 4 client for example. The USB mouse is selected by default in clients that are USB aware.

Um, there is no USB Mouse choice available at least in VB 5.0.*
The choices are…
1. PS/2 Mouse.
2. USB Tablet.
3. USB Multi-Touch Tablet.

I believe the real question here is why the tablet is selected by default, which it is in most of the templates. The reason was because you could move in and out of the guest and not need to use the host key to release the pointer when the guest additions were not installed.

Ah, thanks. I see now that pre-NT Windows guests use PS/2 by default. Makes perfect sense.