Logitech S 530 – Bad First Impression

My Logitech S 530 keyboard and mouse arrived today as expected.

I plugged them in and they worked straight away – so far so good.

Then I downloaded and installed the drivers – that is when the problems started. I configured the drivers after the required reboot, and about a minute later the machine froze on me. I did a hard shut down (hold down the power key) and reboot, and after logging in and getting to the desktop screen the machine froze again.

Now, the machine won’t boot at all. I disconnected the Logitech stuff and hooked up an Apple keyboard and mouse, but to no avail. Even with the shift key down. It gets started, then freezes and the fans come on full blast like they did when I had bad RAM.

So my impressions so far:

  • The Command (Apple) keys are way too small.
  • The Control keys are way too big.
  • The “scroll wheel button” on the mouse is too stiff.
  • The mouse being taller in the front (finger side) than the back (hand side) promotes poor wrist position (tilting up of the hand and wrist).
  • It broke my computer.

Other than that, it’s not bad. Looks nice and the key action isn’t terrible.

I’ve got a bad feeling I’m going to lose an entire day of work because of this purchase.

UPDATE: Perhaps I need to downgrade to the 1.6.2 version that appears to be on the included CD.

UPDATE #2: It appears that the hard shutdowns and boots (caused by the freezes) may have corrupted my hard drive. Trying to boot from a backup to repair it. :fingerscrossed: I really wish I’d gone ahead and done a fresh backup before I installed this turkey.

UPDATE #3: I’m screwed. One of the RAID 0 slices failed. Calling the local data recovery folks now. I was just telling Steve O’Grady I needed to run backups this past weekend. I wish I’d done so. Big mistake letting my backup system lapse after the machine I had automated running them failed. Luckily, 99% of my work is safely checked in to SVN and on my laptop as well. I think at worst I stand to lose photos, music and less than a week of work.

This post is part of the thread: Hard Drive Recovery – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.