That shouldn’t be worth post­ing about, but it took more work than it should have. Sum­mary: I prob­a­bly should have stuck with Log­itech wire­less keyboard/​mouse com­bi­na­tions, because I didn’t have a prob­lem with the pre­vi­ous set I had and never had occa­sion to call their tech­ni­cal sup­port. But since I bought a Microsoft prod­uct, it was worth­while to hound them until they came through on their war­ranty, despite the fact that the expe­ri­ence was some­what painful.

Last August, I bought a new Microsoft cord­less “Desktop” — a key­board and mouse set, I think the model was the Wire­less Com­fort Desk­top 4000. I wasn’t thrilled with them from the begin­ning, as the trans­ceiver had to be very close to the key­board or it would miss char­ac­ters. Sam and I both tried futz­ing with the set­tings and chang­ing bat­ter­ies and so on with­out see­ing any improve­ment. The Log­itech set the new set replaced had a fea­ture I rather missed, wherein the trans­ceiver was also a recharg­ing sta­tion for the mouse. The down­side to that was that if I for­got to put the mouse back in its recharg­ing sta­tion prop­erly, it would occa­sion­ally get run down. I trained myself to remem­ber where the mouse went pretty quickly, though, and that was prefer­able to con­stantly feed­ing the mouse more batteries!

Any­way, the Log­itech set had lasted sev­eral years before it was moved to a PC that wasn’t in use as heav­ily as my main machine is. The new Microsoft set didn’t even last four months before the mouse just died. Yep, died — there was no light com­ing out the bot­tom any more. ¹ After doing all the rea­son­able trou­bleshoot­ing we could think of, I called Microsoft’s hard­ware tech­ni­cal sup­port number.

I quickly real­ized that the num­ber must be routed to India or a lin­guis­ti­cally sim­i­lar place, and after much effort man­aged to make myself under­stood to the indi­vid­ual at the first level. He grudg­ingly agreed to trans­fer me to an actual sup­port tech (sup­pos­edly) at the next level.

When that per­son answered the phone, we had a ver­bal Key­stone Cops rou­tine with her repeat­edly call­ing me by many sounds that that she kept insist­ing were my name. I repeat­edly stated that my name was Cyn­thia Armis­tead, and she repeat­edly told me that no, I was (unin­tel­li­gi­ble). I sug­gested that per­haps she had the name wrong from her co-​​worker, and she finally put me on hold, appar­ently to check with him. It seems that either she was read­ing the first-​​level person’s name in place of mine, or he had put his name in the wrong place — in either case, I’m very happy that nei­ther of them could actu­ally touch our hardware.

After the mat­ter of my iden­tity and right to speak to her were estab­lished, Ms. Microsoft Tech very offi­ciously (and labo­ri­ously) went through her scripts regard­ing check­ing cables and such, and I pre­tended to play along with regards to reboot­ing and so on. For some­one con­tracted to do Microsoft tech­ni­cal sup­port, she was remark­ably unfa­mil­iar with Win­dows 7. Finally, she allowed as how there was a remote pos­si­bil­ity that the mouse itself was defec­tive, and stated that she would order a new mouse to be shipped to me in seven to ten days. I agreed to those terms, and expected a new mouse some­time in January.

There was no new mouse in Jan­u­ary, but I did get a some­what vague email from Ms. MS Tech in Jan­u­ary that seemed to be say­ing some­thing about a delay. Fine, a brief delay wouldn’t be a big deal, right? So I waited for a cou­ple of weeks, but the mouse didn’t come.

Now I was get­ting annoyed. The key­board was get­ting clingier and clingier about its trans­ceiver. I’d put the mouse that came with my dig­i­tiz­ing pad into ser­vice, but it just didn’t fit my hand quite as well as the MS mouse had, and I couldn’t switch it to use it on the left side com­fort­ably for some rea­son (I like to switch hands peri­od­i­cally, to avoid tir­ing out one hand or the other too much). I kept mean­ing to call and find out why I didn’t have a new mouse, but kept putting it off.

Then one week­end I got an auto­mated email say­ing that my sup­port case had been closed, fol­lowed imme­di­ately by another email from some orga­ni­za­tion Microsoft had hired to do cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion sur­veys want­ing me to do one of those web sur­veys regard­ing my expe­ri­ence with their cus­tomer sup­port. Oh, let me tell you, that par­tic­u­lar sur­vey response should get some atten­tion if any­body actu­ally reads it!

You bet­ter believe I was on the phone to that tech sup­port line as soon as they opened again on Mon­day! Actu­ally, the first num­ber I called turned out to be a num­ber I’d been given to check on the ship­ment. The per­son there, appar­ently in the U.S., told me that the desk­top set I’d orig­i­nally pur­chased had been dis­con­tin­ued, so my order had been can­celed because they couldn’t find a replace­ment. Since she wasn’t in the tech­ni­cal sup­port depart­ment, she couldn’t tell me why nobody con­tacted me to offer me another set or any­thing else, and cer­tainly nobody had made any notes in the record when they can­celed the order.

So the next call was to the tech­ni­cal sup­port line. And again, I had to get past the first level per­son (who snip­pily informed me that I couldn’t check the sta­tus of a closed case, and that he wouldn’t con­nect me directly to a super­vi­sor). I’m fairly cer­tain that I was con­nected to the same tech as before, but hon­estly the lan­guage bar­rier was so sig­nif­i­cant that I won’t swear to that fact. I am hop­ing that it was the same per­son, and that most of their per­son­nel speak far bet­ter Eng­lish than she did. The super­vi­sor with whom I finally spoke did speak very clear Eng­lish, hap­pily. In any case, the tech acted as if it were some­how my fault that the order had been can­celed unful­filled, because I had bought a model that would soon be discontinued.

At least the super­vi­sor imme­di­ately said “Oh, no, that shouldn’t have hap­pened. I’m send­ing you a new set right away.” And to his credit, he did. And here it is, the Wire­less Com­fort Desk­top 5000. Since I have it, I’ll review it.

The new key­board feels fairly good so far, even if some of the aux­il­iary keys are in slightly dif­fer­ent places (home, end, insert, delete) and I’m hav­ing to adjust to their new posi­tions. It has a lower pro­file and seems slighter than the older model, with a high-​​gloss black fin­ish. There’s a nub­bly tex­ture to the wrist rest that I rather like, and a low bat­tery indi­ca­tor. While the box claims that the key­board is Com­fort Curve² pre­ferred, I’m not detect­ing much, if any, curve here. Yes, I’m still miss­ing those thick, almost split-​​keyboard Microsoft Nat­ural Key­boards of many years ago.

It doesn’t need to be right next to its trans­ceiver (a good thing, since it’s just a lit­tle USB don­gle, appro­pri­ate for lap­top use) in order to work accu­rately, which is a huge improve­ment. That pre­vi­ous model is the first wire­less key­board I’ve ever had with that prob­lem, and I’m fig­ur­ing it may be one of the rea­sons it was dis­con­tin­ued so quickly.

THe biggest dif­fer­ence in the mouse is that it isn’t curved to one side, so it is eas­ier to use it in either the right or left hand. I sup­pose that’s going to make some peo­ple happy and bother oth­ers. The mouse is tex­tured on either side where one grips it, like the keyboard’s wrist rest. I don’t recall the pre­vi­ous mod­els being tex­tured in that man­ner, so I believe that’s new. The wheel on this model isn’t click­able, whereas the pre­vi­ous one was. The ver­biage on the box does tell me that it does four-​​way scrolling, though! In addi­tion to the two stan­dard mouse but­tons, there are two more tiny ones on each side, a lit­tle smaller and lower pro­file than in the pre­vi­ous model.

But next time I shop for a key­board and mouse, I’m giv­ing Log­itech another try. They can hardly help but do a bet­ter job than Microsoft has this time around!