bluetooth wireless woes

Posted on January 23, 2007 11:18 AM about Apple Microsoft and Google | Technology | |

Everyone is talking about wireless devices these days. All those wires are indeed a pain but recently I have been having problems of the wireless variety.

  • Our VOIP phone drops calls - is it the wireless handset or the VOIP system?
  • Recently our wireless network is having frequent problems reaching from the office to the living room so our HTPC drops off the network. So much for streaming radio...
  • With my new Apple laptop, I got this cool new remote control for iTunes. Unfortunately it talks to my laptop - and my wife's iMac on the other desk. Turning them BOTH on or off.

But my biggest problem has been with my wireless keyboard.

I have the Apple Wireless Keyboard and a Logitech MX900 Bluetooth mouse. Since Apple does not offer a multi-button wireless mouse, I have been using the Logitech mouse. Since Logitech does not provide MacOS drivers (jerks!), this has been kind of a pain but for the past 2 years has worked very well with my previous laptop.

With my new Macbook Pro laptop however, I have been having a lot of problems. The keyboard will work fine and then it will just slow down. Now I am not a fast typer but the keyboard is unable to keep up with me and I have to stop typing and wait for the keys to show up. What is worse, keys often repeat as iffff thhhhey are sssssstuck, so I have to go back and fix it. Woah, this is a huge pain and has been driving me crazy.

Sadly, Google searched did not turn up anyone else with this problem or an answer.

What is causing the problem? I started to experiment.

I replaced the bt keyboard with a wired USB one and the problem went away. Then I replaced my bt mouse with a wired USB one and the problem went away. My conclusion is that having two bluetooth devices is causing this intermittent but very annoying the problem. I did not think bluetooth was supposed to suffer this kind of interference problem but there it is.

  • bt mouse + bt keyboard = problems
  • bt mouse + USB keyboard = OK
  • USB mouse + bt keyboard = OK

For now at least, I am mothballing my mouse and using the wired Logitech mouse with the Apple keyboard instead.

1 Comments

By pokeysan on February 5, 2007 8:29 AM

I have the Apple bluetooth keyboard and no other bluetooth devices, and still suffer this repeat problem infrequently. It is bothersome, as the only way to stop the repeating is to turn off the keyboard. I'm thinking of purchasing a wired keyboard.

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