Logitech Performance MX skipping badly - 802.11ac or hardware failure?

[Makosuke]

I have a Logitech Performance Mouse MX, a relatively high-end, wireless, modern model that uses their unified receiver. It's served me pretty reliably for the time I've had it.

However, I just bought one of the updated MBPs along with a new Airport Base Station, and now my mouse is flaking out so badly that it's practically unusable. It's not just skipping on tracking--button clicks and scrolling will also stop working sporadically but very regularly, even cutting out in the middle of a drag operation causing whatever I'm dragging to get dropped midway. The dropouts range from a brief skip to maybe 1-2 seconds, and happen constantly.

I had maybe seen a very occasional spaz before, but these problems started immediately after upgrading my computer and router, and I'm connected to a home server (resulting in somewhat more than normal network traffic) so I'm inclined to believe that the problems are being caused by the 5GHz band on the router interfering with the wireless connection between the mouse and the receiver.

However... a couple of searches didn't turn up anybody else having these problems, so I'm wondering if it's actually just my mouse coincidentally failing. (I've already tried the obvious things like turning stuff off and back on, and re-pairing the mouse with the receiver.)

Has anybody else had problems like this? Is there a particular 5GHz channel I can pick to avoid the frequency the Unified Receiver uses (it's on auto right now)?

 

[JoeG4]

It could very well be wifi.

For a few years I was living in a really crowded neighborhood! You could pick up 30 wifi networks from a laptop with a good wifi antenna there lol. It made 2.4GHz almost unusable, and even caused a cheap router I tried out to reboot constantly.

My performance MX worked fine there, but the anywhere MX I got behaved exactly like you describe. After we moved, I gave the anywhere MX a shot again, and it's working perfectly fine.

It could be wifi interference.

 

[APlotdevice]

It could also be USB 3.0 interference.

Do you have an USB extender or hub? If so I'd use that to move the receiver away from the computer. If that helps, then it's definitely interference.

 

[Makosuke]

Based on a theory posted on the Logitech forums that, basically, when a router is set to automatically select a channel it and the Logitech receiver will start channel hopping and fighting for a chunk of the 2.4GHz spectrum, causing dropouts like mine, I tried setting my Airport to a fixed Channel 1 (it helps that there aren't any other nearby networks), which seems to have resolved the problems so far.

I'll have to give it a bit longer to declare it fixed, but so far so good.

 

[Acorn]

Based on a theory posted on the Logitech forums that, basically, when a router is set to automatically select a channel it and the Logitech receiver will start channel hopping and fighting for a chunk of the 2.4GHz spectrum, causing dropouts like mine, I tried setting my Airport to a fixed Channel 1 (it helps that there aren't any other nearby networks), which seems to have resolved the problems so far.

I'll have to give it a bit longer to declare it fixed, but so far so good.

wow that sucks. I just threw a microsoft anywhere mouse in the trash for the same exact reason I got so pissed at it. oh well.