A while back — probably a few years back at this point — I discovered the joy of a mechanical keyboard and a good quality mouse. Actually, it's probably more accurate to say I rediscovered it; growing up, after the Atari ST, we had a couple of "proper" IBM PCs, complete with Model M keyboard, and I have fond memories both of using that keyboard and of being able to hear it all the way downstairs when my Dad was typing on it upstairs.
But yeah; I started with a relatively cheap "Tecknet" wired mechanical keyboard and liked the feel and sound of that, so a little while later I decided to spend a bit of money and treat myself to some pricier models: specifically, a Razer Blackwidow V3 Pro keyboard and a Razer Basilisk X Hyperspeed mouse. I chose the Blackwidow V3 Pro specifically because it was a mechanical keyboard that was also wireless — for a while, that was a hard combination to find — and the Basilisk X Hyperspeed because it seemed to be decent without being overcomplicated.
I regret my purchases.
Not because either of them are unusably bad or anything, but because both of them have just enough little annoyances about them to make me wish I'd just stuck with the cheaper kit I was using before — or going with another manufacturer. Razer is very much the basic bitch of PC pimping — although I will say their Kiyo X webcam is genuinely excellent, and I have absolutely no regrets there.
Let's start with the names. If I hadn't told you the Blackwidow was a keyboard and the Basilisk was a mouse, would you have been able to determine which was which? I still have to look it up every time, which is very unhelpful when Razer's software (we'll get onto that in a moment, believe me) informs me that the battery is low on one of them. It doesn't have a helpful little icon showing whether it's the keyboard or mouse; it just says the battery is low in the Blackwidow or the Basilisk. And I'm fucked if I can remember which is which. (Although writing this blog is, annoyingly enough, probably going to help me remember.)
Okay. So the Blackwidow. It's a nice keyboard — feels nice to type on, makes a nice clicky sound when you do so. But it has an eminently stupid design that causes it to get filthier than any keyboard I've ever used. Rather than having the keys in a slightly recessed cutout from the main body of the keyboard, which is easy enough to clean if you take all the keys off and then Hoover it or something, the keys "float" slightly above the keyboard case, which is otherwise solid. This means all manner of disgusting crap gets caught in between and beneath the keys within about five seconds of you starting to use it, and cleaning it seems woefully ineffective because immediately after doing so, it attracts filth again.
Possibly related to the perpetually filthy status is the fact that the volume knob on the top right of the keyboard is a real roll of the dice on whether or not it'll actually do what you want it to do. A significant portion of the time, it will do the exact opposite of what you are indicating you would like it to do, and sometimes it will just judder back and forth between two values. The particularly annoying thing about it is that I generally don't use it to adjust the volume, so any time I have to use it, it is because I have knocked it accidentally. And on multiple occasions it has taken several minutes to revert it to 100% after it had dropped to just 80% or so.
The Blackwidow has the obligatory RGB lighting that everything vaguely "premium" has to have on PCs these days, and this is all very nice, apart from the inexplicable fact that the hash key refuses to light up when the keyboard is in wireless mode. It's not broken, because it lights up when the keyboard is connected via USB, and it's not a faulty profile, because I've tried changing the profile and even setting the options for that key individually. It's just… fucked somehow in a non-mechanical way. And it's little annoyances like that which make you realise how surprisingly often you want to use the hash key in the dark.
Speaking of wired versus wireless, I discovered a while back that the keyboard will not charge its battery unless the Razer software is installed. This was something of a problem when I determined that the Razer software was causing my PC to freeze up. (It transpires that something else was wrong on a deeper level, because a complete reformat and Windows reinstall fixed the freezes, but still.) It's also just fucking stupid. What other USB device does not charge unless you are running a specific piece of software? One of the main benefits of USB is that you can just plug a thing into a socket and it charges, even if the computer doesn't know how to talk to the device otherwise. But no! Not the case with the Razer Blackwidow V3 Pro. So pro that it can't handle charging without its special software to hold its hand. Real fearsome.
Now, onto the Basilisk, which I think I hate significantly more than the Blackwidow, which at least is 98% reliably functional, wireless hash key aside. I have never had as many connectivity problems with a wireless mouse as I have done with the Basilisk. I don't sit an unreasonable distance away from my computer — basically the computer is under my TV, and the keyboard and mouse are on a coffee table in front of the sofa — but this goddamn thing will not stay connected if there is any form of obstacle in its path. And I mean anything. Put a box of biscuits in front of it so you can stuff your face while idly browsing YouTube? Flashy light, lost connection. Put a glass of drink vaguely in front of it for mid-game refreshment? Flashy light, lost connection. Put a discarded lunch plate on the table near it because you'll take it to the kitchen the next time you stand up? Flashy light, lost connection.
It's annoying, because other than this fairly glaring issue, the Basilisk is a nice mouse. It has a good, comfortable shape, nicely clicky buttons and a scroll wheel that, so far, does not appear to have suffered the same fate as the volume control on the Blackwidow — or, indeed, the fate every single Apple mouse I have used has succumbed to. You can actually scroll with it, in other words. It has a couple of side buttons that default to forward/back buttons when web browsing, but I don't really use them. As a basic mouse, it's comfortable, and were it not for the connectivity issues, I would like it a lot. Unfortunately, the connectivity issues happen frequently enough for it to be massively irritating.
"So just replace them!" you might say. "Reader, I spent £250 on the pair of them," I will reply. "I am going to at least attempt to get my money's worth."
And then, sotto voce, "And then never spend that much on a keyboard and mouse ever again."
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I had a Razer mouse and those connectivity problems sound eerily familiar. Initially, I had believed them to be the result of bad batteries (yes, the mouse I had ran off AA batteries) but it was also an issue when I popped in a freshly-charged pair of eneloops. Eventually, the scroll wheel klick died and last year I replaced with a different, albeit cheaper mouse with pretty much the same feature set after the left mouse button kicked the bucket.