Added Logitech LX7 Wireless Mouse

[Donald Darden]

I decided to look for a better wireless mouse to replace the el cheepo that I have, which runs through two AAs every week.  I use rechargeable batteries, but the battery compartment door is suffering from too many removals,  I worked in some flexible glue that has strengthened it, but I just decided that I could do better.

Finding wireless optical mice is easy, but deciding on a price range and features was sort of tough.  I don't need a gamer's mouse, and I wanted something that felt good in my hand.  A notebook wireless mouse would be too small to fit well in my hand.  I finally checked out a display of mice at a Best Buy store to help me with the feel issue.  Then I went shopping online.

I found sellers on eBay that were selling manufacturer-reconditioned LX7 optical mice for between $7 and $15, with shipping costs between $5 and $15.  Doing the math, I settled on one that came to less than $17.  I got it about a week later, but only a LifeChat CD from Microsoft included.  Still, my Win 2K system recognized the USB mouse receiver immediately, but the mouse did not work.
I checked out the Logitech web site, found the software they recommend for this mouse and for this OS, which was SetPoint310.exe.  I was able to install the software, but the mouse was still not recognized.  Generic instructions at the web site only confused things, because there were no buttons on the receiver, so most of the directions did not apply.

The seller advised me to contact their tech support, and I also used email to contact Logitech.  The best explanation came from the seller of what I had to do, but the Connect Utility that came with the SetPoint software refused to run.  I lost several days, what with following more and more extreme steps as outlined from Logitech, including modifying my system to perform a clean boot (remove all run items in Regedit, and all items in Startup)m and disabling all antivirus software,  I finally performed a reinstall of Windows 2000 on a different partition  ,updated it, then tried to install SetPoint again and use Connect Utility.  Again, it failed to work.  I finally concluded that SetPoint310.exe was buggy.  I tried every way to find out something from the Logitech web site, but it was no help. 

I finally put SetPoint310.exe in Google and went searching.  I immediately found a site where several versions of SetPoint was posted for downloading.  Not only could I then click on each package, but I was then showed which OSes that version would work on.  I found there is a version SetPoint315.exe that was available for Win 2k, XP, and Server 2003, so I downloaded and installed it.  That version permitted the Connect Utility to run, and following the instructions from the seller, I was able to get the mouse to sync up with the receiver.  Now the mouse is working great - in fact, as long as the mouse is powered, it maintains sync and is recognized by Windows installs that do not have SetPoint set up on them.

All this messing around with my Windows install left me with some problems that I needed to resolve on my system.  I had begun having some problems with Windows every since I added a 2nd hard drive of 320 GB to my system and partitioned half of it as an NTFS volume.  Windows has a funny way of deciding the sequence of drive letters to assign, and insisted on making the first primary on the first drive as C:, then the first primary on the second drive as D:.  This through my remaining drive letters off my one, which made them unbootable.  I had to modify the mounted devices in the Registry to try and correct this, but Windows would keep forcing me to check this, because things could happen to cause this to change.

And then Windows and my BIOS both conspired to cause my USB external hard drive to be seen as C: during a Windows install or recovery effort, which again through drive letters amuck.  It proved too much to keep working well, so I had to reinstall and update my alternate Windows installs to accomodate the NTFS volume on the second drive as my D: volume.  Right now, everything seems to be working fine again, but it's been days just getting to this point.

Speaking of install problems, not all of them can be attributed to Windows.  I've found a minor irritation when setting up multiple installs of Linux.  Each one insists on a swap drive set up for it, but if more than one install uses the same swap drive, you can have errors reported by a different install if you boot to it later.  Yet if you set up a swap for each install, you can't designate which install uses which swap partition, and apparently each install will use the first swap partition found.  I suppose you could mask one install's swap partition from a different install if you temporarily change its type, but I haven't actually tried this yet.  I'll see if any wiser or more experienced heads have anything to say before I go into this further. 

[Donald Darden]

If you have an older PC, your BIOS may not recognize drives with capacity over 128 GB properly, and insist that you only have 128 GB capacity.  Some people install new disk controllers to deal with this, others may replace their BIOS chips, others may buy a new PC, and some resign themselves to using only 128 GB of their new drive capacity.

There is an easy and free fix for this, which is to get the Intel® Application Accelerator (search for the term) as a download and install it.  It will detect for any drives that are not fully recognized and offer to apply itself to them, and if you already have large capacity drives that have been used as such, it will recognize them automatically.

When Intel® Application Accelerator recognizes a drive that is not formatted, it will likely set it up as a dynamic drive rather than a basic drive.  A dynamic drive is actually a method of having a drive structure that can act as an extension of other drives, creating an environment where you do not see this as a separate drive, but part of one massive drive structure.  A basic drive is just the traditional concept of a single, hard drive, with its own drive letter, which can then be partitioned into multiple primary and logical drives.

It is not obvious, but if you don't want a dynamic drive here, you can use Start/Settings/Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management, and then in the right column (the first (gray) field that says Disk 0, Disk 1, etc.), you right-click on that drive and you have to choice to change a dynamic drive into a basic one, or vice versa.  Then you will have to partition and format the drive, which you can do here or elsewhere.  Note that this is also the place where you can preset path and drive letters for the different drives in your system.  You cannot have two drives with the same letter at the same time (for obvious reasons), and you will need to reboot for the changes to work, and you cannot change the drive letter for your system drive here either.  Some of these changes are possible by using Regedit to modify the Registry, and changing the settings under Local Machine/System/Mounted Devices, but changing your system partition will probably mean reinstalling Windows.

PartitionMagic and other disk management tools may also permit you to recognize and format large capacity drives, but the above method works well enough that you probably do not need them.   

[Petr Schreiber]

Thanks for this information,

always better to have access to personal experience.
I have Logitech multimedia Keyboard, had some minor issues with SetPoint, but all got fixed after Windows Updates.

As mouse I still use original Microsoft ball-mouse with wheel. Works perfectly


Bye,
Petr

[Marco Pontello]

I had begun having some problems with Windows every since I added a 2nd hard drive of 320 GB to my system and partitioned half of it as an NTFS volume.  Windows has a funny way of deciding the sequence of drive letters to assign, and insisted on making the first primary on the first drive as C:, then the first primary on the second drive as D:.

That's something that has it roots on the DOS way of dealing with partitions.

For myself, I found that the easiest way to deal with additional drives to added and maybe repeatedly connected / exchanged and so on, it's to create/use an extended partition, instead of a primary one.

Bye!

[Donald Darden]

I've also added a Microsoft LifeChat LX-3000 USB Headset to my PC.  It works perfectly under Windows, no drivers needed.  But it takes some effort to set it up under Linux.  I'm going to speak to my experieces with Ubuntu 7.10 on this, but it's probably about the same on other distrabutions.

Linux recognized the headset right off, but not the in-line controls for microphone on/off, off-hook, and volume up/down controls.  Plus, there was no sound out of the headset.  I could verify that it was there, but then I had to do some exploring to find answers on the internet.  And not all the answers were good.

Basically, the problem was that Linux was giving preference to the sound card that is already in the PC, and ignoring the headset.  To change this, I had to to under System/Preferences/Sound, and change most (or all) the settings from autodetect to USB audio, then use Test to see if they worked.  They did. but I had no control over the volume, and the sound was piercing.

Then I used the volume control on the top toolbar, but that had no effect either.  After some research, I found I could right-click on the volume control and select Preferences, and there I could pick from several devices, including Microsoft LifeChat LX-3000 (alsa mixer).  I also had to select the Speaker, meaning that this limited control would now control the speaker volume.

But I still could not play anything through the headset, and that led me at last to the Terminal Console and using alsamixer -c 1 to change from the default device (0), which is the built-in sound chip, to device 1, which is the Microsoft LifeChat LX-3000,  In addition to allowing you to change the default device, Alsamixer opens a control window where you can set the bias for the amplitude of the mike and the speaker.  You can work this in conjuction with the top volume control and the buttons on the in-line control to find an acceptable audio range for the headphones.

But you are not quite done yet.  Undet Applications/Sonds & Video, you may have some applications that need to be modified as well.  And you may add more, such as the mplayer movie player, smplayer,  xmms, VLC, and so on.

But now I found what seems to be an insummountable problem:  That is, I wanted to play streaming video from news sources through my browser and hear them on my headset.  The browser is of course FireFox (for Linux, anyway), and in order to play streaming video, I had to remove totem-mozilla and install both mplayer and mozilla-mplayer, then look for posts concerning Linux firefox wmv bbc stage6 to locate some guidelines on configuring mplayer to properly download and play video newsfeeds.  BBC and Stage6 proved important to finding the right thread, and just begin with the first post in the thread for most instructions.  Some of the remaining posts show other settings that others adopted, but the first thread is key to the whole topic.

As to getting the right codecs (the modules that actually make sense of the many different formats and protocols out there), look for Linux codecs binaries .  This need to be copied into a specific (or several) folders.  Look for the README file to find out where to put them.  In Linux, you can make copies into each directory, or create either a symbolic or hard link to the files in one directory.

If all this gets done well enough, you should be able to play streaming video from newscasts via FireFox.  And hear it through your PC speakers.  But here is the rub:   You will not abe able to hear it through your headset.  Now the problem seems to be that mplayer, which does the video and the audio, is not set up to direct the sound to LifeChat LX-3000, and I can't find anything to explain how to do it.  It is simply not an option.  Now I did find mention of a method that might work, which is that you can blacklist devices that you do not want Linux to recognize, which may force it to use an alternative, but I haven't gone that far in my efforts yet/  And I am not sure I want to permanently disable anything, I would rather have choice.

Incidentally, if you want another method for trying to get FireFox to handle streaming video, you can use apt-get to remove firefox, make note of the several packages that will get removed at the same time, then reinstall firefox and each of those packages with apt-get install, and when you use firefox to access a video link, it should ask you if you want to open it with mplayer, then ask if you want to also install one or more codecs to handle the video.  The result is slightly different, but again you should have video and sound through your PC hardware - just not the headset.

Of course I am only referring to USB headsets here.  There are headsets that work with standard sound cards and jacks, and they should work just fine.