After six hours of back-breaking labour last night, I’m finally running a new PC built specially for the work I do. It’s got a Core i7 CPU, Vista 64-bit SP2, six gigs of RAM and a 5.1 channel home theater speaker system by Genelec. I also replaced my previous keyboard with a new Microsoft Natural Wireless Ergonomic 7000. It connects to the PC via 2.4 GHz dongle which is currently residing in one of the USB ports at the back of the PC.
As you can guess by the subject, this keyboard is slowly driving me insane. Firstly, there’s no indicator for F Lock. This means I can’t tell whether pressing F2 results in UNDO or RENAME. Imagine moving a bunch of files from directory A to directory B. You then want to rename directory B, so you select the directory and press F2. Whoosh! The files are back in directory A. It’s enough to make a thick vein on my temple pulsate rather alarmingly.
But that’s nothing compared to the most infuriating ‘feature’ I’ve ever come across wrt keyboards. For some totally unknown reason, the keyboard quite simply stops working for 10-30 seconds. This happens totally at random. And there’s no way to ‘wake’ the keyboard up. In other words, suddenly the keyboard no longer functions and there’s nothing I can do about it.
While the keyboard was frozen, I opened the Microsoft Keyboard control panel to check if the problem was caused by poor batteries. Nope, the batteries are fine. What about the wireless signal strength then? It’s ‘High’, with full five out of five bars.
Googling for solutions was of no help. I found a few other users who complained about having the same issue but nobody had a solution. Microsoft’s Support pages offered a solution: move the 2.4 GHz dongle closer to the keyboard and/or make sure there’s nothing metallic between the dongle and keyboard. Now, why would I need to do that? Their own control panel tells me there’s nothing wrong with the signal strength.
Oddly enough, the problem has not occurred while I was typing this post. Perhaps the issue went away on its own? Yeah, right…
A wee update: installing Microsoft’s latest Keyboard software solved the F Lock issue. Pressing the F Lock key shows a tiny info balloon on screen, reporting whether F Lock is on or off. Freezing keyboard issue disappeared almost completely when I borrowed a USB extension cord with a tabletop cradle from Belkin’s WiFi dongle kit. The keyboard dongle now resides 20 centimeters from the keyboard and freezes occur maybe once a week, if that. In other words, my wireless keyboard is now using wireless transmission for the distance of 20 centimeters, and for the rest of the way the signal travels in a wire. How’s that for wireless?