Is there any further diagnostics I could do for you or Wendell to see what may be going on with these Razer products? I mean don’t get me wrong I’m trying LTT solutions with frankly nowhere near the same level of understanding (I do networking for cinema lighting, so really adjacent to true computing) so I don’t expect it to be flawless but I’m really stumped by the different behaviors. I mean even one mouse being plugged directly in to the PC installed like 12 drivers into device manager.
EDIT: To anyone who may see this in the future, as of this post the current version of Synapse 4 is BROKEN. Going back to Synapse 3 fixed EVERYTHING on the USB side.
I was amazed (not in a good way) to see Razer’s software be downloaded automatically from Microsoft upon connecting a Razer mouse, automatically executed the installer and prompted to install Synapse. Sure, it can be cancelled, but I want auto-installed drivers to be the bare minimum.
At least Razer mice (at least those I’ve used) store button mappings onboard, so once configured, you don’t need the software running all the time.
The uninstaller doesn’t remove everything. I had a ton of phantom “devices” in Device Manager after removing Synapse.
Everything is working 99% (honestly the only issues I ever have are with the GPU dock at this point) but that macro pad you recommended is not working properly…
Really? I found Synapse 4 more stable of the two. Lighter and profile shares between KVM machines without complaining the are out of sync and throwing up a dialog to use local or overwrite from Razer.
Synapse 3 also couldn’t handle a large installed steam library. Their game manager service in V3 would peg one core at 100% for 10+ minutes. Issue fixed in V4.
So a few years ago, someone unearthed a rather silly vulnerability in Razer’s software and the automatic driver download in Windows Update. By default this runs as NT Auth SYSTEM (the equivalent of the root account for Windows). The only way to make this safe is to either: 1) Make it completely silent and unattended install. 2) Offer the installation package, but force the logged in user to run it with their credentials, and trigger a UAC prompt.
Welp Razer did neither–the installer ran as SYSTEM and interactively; even worse the file explorer prompt allowed running arbitrary commands like cmd.exe powershell etc which would also run as SYSTEM. Do a Google search for “bleepingcomputer razer bug admin” to get the article about it.
They got a lot flack for this from us in the cybersecurity community, and they’ve had multiple similar blunders since then.
In terms of Gaming peripherals. You really can’t judge the quality by just hardware. You have to take into consideration the company’s software and especially if it’s required to run and how glitchy it is.
IMO Logitech is miles ahead better than any other company I’ve dealt with. Both Options and G Hub apps. I opt to go with them for this reason. Plus they have an onboard memory feature on several of their gaming peripherals. I WFH and so installing software isn’t really feasible. That onboard mode allows extra features without the software installation. The devices I have also support Windows dynamic lighting. None of my Steelseries peripherals support it.
Corsair iCue is ok. Steelseries GG is tolerable, as long as you don’t need Sonar (if you do, run for the hills). I actively avoid Razer due to how bad their software has been for a long while.