They wanted the mouse to have a name like "Microsoft® Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000" but they accidentally used the wrong encoding and the name was invalid. Because they already made thousands of devices without properly testing them, the "obvious" solution was to patch the Bluetooth stack on every single computer in the world to fix this issue. It's the only Bluetooth device released in computer history that requires this.

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[–] 111 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Leave it to Microsoft to give a mouse a five-word brand name.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I can't wait for the new copilot mouse to come out!

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  • [–] 61 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Lots of drivers are doing things like this I bet. It’s much easier to fix software than hardware.

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  • [–] 31 points 1 year ago

    I remember when one of the Guitar Hero games was first released for Xbox, they soon had a big problem where lots of guitar peripherals were behaving strangely. I think in the end the whammy bar wasn’t always going to what the sensor read as 100 or 0 or something like that because of weak springs or poor physical fit with the plastic, and in the end the fix was basically to adjust how the values were read in software.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    Unlikely to be the case for mice, though, since lots of mice use the same drivers. As far as I'm aware, there's just a handful of popular chipsets, which implement the logic, so you just need a handful of drivers.

    This is particularly apparent on Linux, where most drivers are built into the kernel. You can take virtually any mouse and use it on Linux without installing drivers (although you might still want a separate program to setup LEDs or DPI profiles or whatever).
    And yeah, you don't want to have to get a patch into the Linux kernel to fix random spelling mistakes or similar...

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  • [–] 29 points 1 year ago (12 children)

    I’ve got a lot of time for Microsoft hardware. I remember around 2000 when if you wanted a mouse or keyboard you basically had to buy whatever abomination Logitech was flogging at the time. Then Microsoft came along and started making stuff that was actually a little sexy.

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  • [+] 9 points 1 year ago (5 children)
  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    My kid just had an issue with his Logitech wireless mouse right clicking with both buttons!

    I looked in settings and then I used the mouse on Linux and windows and got the same effect. It turns out Logitech mice use piece of shit button switches.

    But no problem I fixed the problem in like 5 minutes once I knew what the problem was. I gave my kid a wired mouse temporarily. Then I went to Amazon and searched for wireless mice. No more Logitech for me thanks.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    I've been using the same Logitech 502 mouse for around 7 years now, with a lot of hours of FPS games. It wasn't cheap, could this be a case where the inexpensive thing becomes more expensive in the long run?

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  • [–] [S] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    They use shit switches but their wireless chipset is the best. The battery life is years instead of weeks and it's always responsive like if it was wired. My HP Bluetooth mouse depletes its battery 20x faster than my Logitech Bluetooth mouse and most importantly when it goes in the sleep mode (around after 15 mins) it needs a click to wake up + it takes a couple seconds to reconnect. Infuriating.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    That's the problem. A mouse is currently not a user serviceable item. Remember the days of the rubber ball mice?

    They wanted a mouse subscription system? Well they got it and I'm out. Their 1 year mouse stinks.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    It took me 20-30 minutes to open up my G502 and install new switches. Of course, you probably want to have some soldering experience to do this, but if it's already unusable... why not try? (assuming you know someone who owns a soldering iron)

    I bought an Incott G24 recently, which is a Chinese clone of a Zowie EC2. The software is shit (I set it up once and never used it again) but it has hotswappable switches for M1/M2 which is something I'd love to see in mainstream mice, but they would lose money for it, so it'll never happen.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    The WMO was the pinnacle of gaming mouses at the time and it was just an ugly office mouse everyone had around.

    I still have one because it was so coveted and they stopped producing/providing it.

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  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago*

    Out of all major operating systems, somehow Windows handles Bluetooth the absolute worst. From my experience:

    Android: 99.9% reliability

    iOS: 99.9% reliability but a pain to toggle

    MacOS: Not really sure but probably near iOS/Android

    Ubuntu: 97% reliability

    Random Linux distro: 20% reliability

    Windows: 5% reliability. Yes, that's really my success rate at connecting Bluetooth headphones to Windows 11.

    It's atrocious that Microsoft focuses more on ads in the OS rather than fixing their Bluetooth.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I bet that same workaround is probably implemented in Linux as well.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Linux would probably handle it gracefully.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Wouldn't surprise me if it doesn't check the UTF-8 validity at all and just lets the apps get broken UTF-8 where most of the time nothing horrible happens. That or they just strip invalid characters.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Yeah, this seems to be a display name, not some technical identifier. Microsoft cares about displaying it correctly, because it's their product, but I doubt anyone else does...

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