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09 February 2010 

1/1 

Our good friend Eddy over at Chieftec has sent me their colour coded Wireless Keyboard & Mouse (Blue). These match the colours that their case are available in, if you go to their site you will be able to see the full range of colours.

the case is not included in the set!

product specs:

The colour of this keyboard and mouse matches perfectly to the colour of Chieftec's blue cases. This is a great looking set but will they do what they are supposed to do.

Installation is very easy; you need to make sure you disable any other mouse and keyboard drivers before you attempt to install these ones. Once you have uninstalled previous drivers you need to power down your computer and connect the receiver to your keyboard and mouse sockets on your motherboard, next install batteries in both the keyboard and the mouse and turn your computer back on again. Your windows operating system should automatically detects new hardware, the next thing you need to do is install the supplied software, this is so that you can make use of the extra buttons that are on the keyboard.

keyboard:

There are a total of 8 extra buttons on this keyboard:

- Play/pause
- Mute
- Refresh
- Internet browser
- Mail program
- Increase volume
- Decrease volume
- Connection button

If you have a keyboard with extra buttons on ask yourself how many times you have actually used them, I could answer for you, hardly ever. Some people may disagree, buy I am giving you my opinion in this review, so its tough lol..

The connection button ensures that only your keyboard works with the receiver. There is also an indication LED on the keyboard, this flashes as buttons are being pressed on the keyboard.

The keyboard is powered by 2 x AAA batteries, there are no guarantees on how long the batteries will last but the manual said 3-6 months under normal usage, if there is such thing as normal usage. The keyboard keys are nice and soft and quite comfortable to use, all round quite a nice piece of kit.


mouse:

I have to say I don't like the mouse much at all; the mouse uses what I regard as the OLD mouse ball function. Because I have been using an optical mouse for quite a while, it was very hard trying to get used to using a ball mouse again. I changed to optical due to the fact I got fed up of cleaning the mouse ball every five minutes. I would have thought that they would have incorporated optical technology into this mouse as all other manufacturers are doing.

On the bottom of the mouse there is a reset button, if you press the reset button on the receiver and then on the mouse it will automatically configure your mouse to your receiver, that way you don't get any interference from other wireless devices within the room. This mouse takes 1 x AA battery and again should last 3-6 months.

This mouse has three buttons and a scroll wheel, when the scroll wheel is pressed down this makes the third button.

I do have to say I had some problems with this mouse when it was first installed, the cursor kept jumping around as though their was some interference but after a bit of messing about trying to work out what was wrong I decided to check the battery. You can guess what happened, it started to work properly. The battery that was supplied with the mouse only had enough power to light the LED on the front of the mouse and not enough power the send data to the receiver. Now that there is a new battery in the mouse it moves quite smoothly over the mouse mat. You will be glad to know that there have been no other problems since this one was rectified.


receiver:

Their isn't a great deal I can tell you about this but I will tell you what I can. On the top of the receiver there is a reset button, this is so that if you find you get some interference from another device you can reconfigure the link to you keyboard and mouse. The front of the receiver has two LEDs one tells you when buttons are being pressed on the keyboard and the other tells you when the mouse is being moved or buttons pressed. It is recommended that the receiver be placed at least 20cm away from your computer and monitor to avoid any interference.


manual:

There is a manual provided with this set, but it is only in English and only a couple of pages long, this might be down to the fact that this is a review item???


conclusion:

I don't want to be to hard on this product as it was built so that people who own a Chieftec case can colour match their keyboard and mouse, but at the same time people want value for money. My overall view of these products is that they look good, keyboard is quite nice to use but the mouse should have been optical rather than a ball mouse. Some people may like using ball mice; which is ok but for me times have changed and optical is what people are going for. I would have preferred to have no batteries supplied than have all the messing about trying to find out what was wrong, Might have been just a dodgy battery but still counts against it in any case.

modtown rating: 3.5 out of 5

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