I would believe that most of us should think that wireless is a very convenient way to do things in our daily lives. Look at all the advancements that have been accomplished over the years with wireless, most prominently or importantly is the cell phone. Some of you may be a little to young to remember a time when we rented our telephones from the phone company, and they were large heavy and corded. You would either have it mounted to a wall, or have a more or less permanent place for it. Everyone knew where it was in the house, even your neighbors. But as technology progressed, so did the use of wireless technology. Now we have Blue tooth, WiFi, Cellular, Satellite and the list goes on and on.
With this concept in mind, I plunged in and got some wireless keyboards for all my families computers. Knowing that there was a potential for cross frequency interference especially if they were too close to each other, I made sure that I bought brands that will be able to handle it. Of course being the frugal person that my mother raised me to be, I did my research online and bought the ones that were the least expensive of course. So I ended up with a Logitech S510 and a couple Logitech Ex110.
Problem:
After several months on enjoying them on each computer, I decided to move my computer from the closet office down into the family room. (I’m thinking more time to share thoughts and ideas.) All was well for about one month. All of a sudden, at least to me, my wireless mouse became unresponsive. When my system would boot, I would loose connectivity with the mouse making it somewhat difficult to log in to the computer.
Troubleshooting:
The first thing I did was the press the connection button on the receiver. That didn’t work, so I then tried the basic trouble shooting techniques like change the batteries, switching receivers, moving the mouse to another computer… and none of theses worked. Shortly thereafter my keyboard started having problems. It would not connect to the receiver, would not allow me to type the password to log in, etc. So I started the same troubleshooting techniques as with the mouse, unfortunately the same results. Strange, these items would not work on any computer in the house., did they just up and die on me? After looking on the blogs, forums, and customer service websites, I found no answers. They did mention things about interference, but these items did work fine for quite a while, so what changed?
Solution:
Since the thought had crossed my mind that there might be some interference of some kind that wasn’t there before I decided to look into what it could be. We have some old 2.4Ghz cordless phones in use that one of the receivers had been lost to, so I decided to disconnect the remaining one and try again. Low and behold, they worked! The mouse and the keyboard functioned again. Perhaps it was trying to contact the remote unit or just started to malfunction. It could have been something in my neighbors house or a combination thereof that was causing all the interference, who knows really. I’m am certain that it was an outside influence. So now the question was, do I change the phones or the mouse and keyboard. I decided to change the phones. A quick look on eBay found me three 5Ghz phones w/answering machine for only $25 with free shipping. The frequency jump should eliminate or at least reduce any future interference from this source. I’m not picky with my phones, and I hardly use them because of my good cellular coverage so this was obviously the best bet, because new keyboards and mice would go well over $25.
Something interesting happened throughout all of this. During my investigation, I ran a check on the security of wireless keyboards and ultimately decided the convenience is not worth the potential price, especially with identity theft on the rise. Numerous blogs and websites show how easy it is to capture someones key strokes and I do a lot of business on the web. Keyboard manufactures are not taking security as seriously as I would like on their lower end products, and I’m just too frugal to spend $100 dollars or more on a more secure device that will just get something spilled in it sooner or later.
Take a look at these videos and see if you agree.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TlPYOC2zD4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm-sVgcSHx0
So what shloud I do with the now working keyboards and mice? I’ll probably sell them to people I know or give them away when I upgrade my computers. Others are not as paranoid as I may be.
