Random Ramblings

I've used Logitech products since my family's very first computer. They've generally got a good reputation for products that work well for a long time and I've certainly found that to be the case most of the time. I did get a G500 gaming mouse a few years back that started having some weird issues after less than a year of use. Since I'd heard so much singing of praises of the Razer Naga gaming mouse and I felt I needed more buttons anyway, rather than try to get anything sorted out through the warranty or the like, I just bought a Naga. It was missing features the G500 had that I liked (such as being able to flick the middle button side to side for two more buttons), but I mostly got used to it. Then, about six months after getting the Naga, I had one of the buttons break and stop registering use. Now I was getting irritated. Were gaming mice just unable to hold up to any actual use?

I believe I documented my nightmare of trying to get things resolved through Razer's support here at the time, but I'll summarize it anyway. It would take days, sometimes over a week, to get emails from their customer service (and IIRC, they didn't have a number available to call). I had to send my defective mouse to them before they'd do anything. Then they sent me their new model, which had a different layout and had two of the buttons below the middle mouse button. Now, maybe people who do some of the weird claw grips when gaming could reach those. But those of us who use the normal palm grip? That put the buttons at the base of my fingers/beneath my palm, where previously they'd been off to the side of the left mouse button and could be easily hit by moving my index finger slightly to the left (much like a couple of buttons on the G500). I fought with them for weeks trying to get them to give me a functional equivalent to my old mouse as their warranty claimed (I don't think having an different layout with two buttons suddenly inaccessible counts as "functional equivalent"), and while in the end I got them to agree, I just couldn't bear to spend more money to send the stupid thing they sent me back (because of course I had to do that first) and in the meantime I'd gotten used to using my G500 again and decided to just stick with it.

The weird ticks when trying to move and the like showed up again, though, so I just bought another G500, as they were usually available on Amazon for not much more than some of the mice I used to buy from Logitech that would last 5+ years. I figured this time, if I ended up having any issues, I had the old G500 and the stupid Naga hanging around, so I'd be able to deal with warranty crap of sending stuff back and forth while still actually being able to use my computer (after all, surely Razer's practices are standard for the industry, right?).

Fast forward to the past week or so. Less than a year after purchase, my new G500 was acting up. Seemingly at random when I was trying to click on things in games, I'd immediately drop them or other weird stuff. I did some googling and found out that it's actually a really common problem-the mouse has some poor design on the inside and eventually the contact on some part starts getting messed up and clicks frequently register as double-clicks. That suddenly made the weird problems I'd had with the old G500 make sense-I was getting the stuttering when walking because I'd hold down both mouse buttons to walk, but then one of them would suddenly register a double click and stop me. While the new G500 lasted a bit longer before descending to problems in the first place, it quickly got much, much worse than the old one. Soon, about half of all clicks were registering as double-clicks. So I'd try to resize a window and it'd immediately end up back at the original size, or things would get unselected, and so on, and that's not even getting into the nightmare of trying to game with it. I went to Logitech's site and found an article about how if you were experiencing problems with a double-click, you should make sure some Windows setting wasn't on. That made me mad, because this was a documented, well-known hardware problem with things like videos on how to fix it floating around online. I checked the setting just in case, though of course I hadn't randomly set it, and it was only to deal with using single or double-clicks to open up program icons in the first place.

They didn't have a support email, only a non-toll-free number, so I braced myself and called yesterday. Typical annoying phone tree, and I got sent to an Indian call center. Sigh. Thankfully, while the connection was extremely quiet, I got someone that was truly fluent in English and she was willing to go off script to talk to me as if I was a human being (I had some really bad experiences with Comcast lately and their Indian call center where neither was the case). She got the support ticket all made up in a few minutes and wanted me to stay on the phone until the email she sent me and that I needed to reply to with a copy of my receipt arrived to be sure it got there. The "hardest" part of the whole procedure was digging up the receipt from the mass of orders I make on Amazon and then trying to dig up MS Paint since I don't have anything like Photoshop installed at the moment, having not had need since I last reformatted. So I replied with the receipt and soon had a response that the issue had been forwarded to the warranty team. I'd asked if I would have to go through the whole circus of sending my old mouse back, because some of the wording of the script about the possibility of receiving an updated G500s made me wonder if I didn't have to, and she didn't know.

So, having just called support yesterday, today I got to my computer to find that I already had a reply from warranty support. I would in fact be receiving the new G500s (which is a new model that must have just come out in the past few months and which I pray they fixed the engineering on since the problem I experienced has been known about for years), I could expect it in the next 5-7 business days, and that I did not, in fact, have to send the old one back (not sure if that was standard in their response or done in response to my question, but either way, huzzah).

So, in short, getting support from Logitech was everything that Razer support was not and should have been. Where I will never, ever buy anything from Razer again, I will continue to happily purchase Logitech items and highly recommend them. I daresay, the only company I've had an even better response from is Amazon, and that's only because the orders are made directly from them, so they're able to look them up on their internal systems rather than me having to send a copy of a receipt.