Today I was hoping to sit back, enjoy Sunday dinner, have a few coffees, read some news and watch some YouTube… while also finalising my choice for my year long project for university. Now I did write recently about my new piece of equipment, the very sleek, wonderful feeling and clacky Razer BlackWidow conflicts my jealous Roccat Kova – they then decided to fight through the medium of my system and by means of driver conflicts. I just can’t have a quiet Sunday…

It seems for the past few months, every other Sunday something has chosen to mess up my weekend… generally speaking this has been something to do with hardware. So I was less than impressed when my Razer BlackWidow’s drivers decided to use digital chloroform on my Kova. Bundled up with random bluescreens and I have a sudden feeling that my PC has me backed into a corner, snarling for my life back; and this moment is where I want to throw my PC out the window and buy a console… though I realise they have their own problems, amongst which is that they aren’t PCs.

Launch operation “delete ALL THE DRIVERS” – I go to our closet and pull out the PS/2 keyboard, I proceed to march towards my system rattling its keys like an ancient tribal soldier would rattle a totem or their shield and spear to demoralise their enemy. I remove all USB devices… yes all of them from the rear of my system, and proceed to delete any which are greyed out in device manager which look remotely like something connected to USB devices*. When it offers me a gift in the form of a tick box, asking for driver removal by golly do I tick it!

Then, I proceed to plug the Razer in and I note it appears twice as a HID compliant device – once in mice, and once under keyboards. So does the new-boy, no wonder they compete. As I mention above, I haven’t developed the will to test this… my system remains working and un-restarted. I will weep if the problem persists, which I have little doubt it probably will.

* Should this does work, you can go to “view -> show hidden devices” you may also have to setup the system variable according to this guide, it was the first I came across so I have no idea if its necessary in Windows 7, I just did it to prevent an imminent headache.

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I am in the process of talking with Razer, though I suspect I may well have to contact Roccat too. It appears each device has some opposite element from their cousins – I have no idea why. Furthermore I’m not just a one brand guy, in this case I have no idea if the Roccat Kova[+] or indeed any other Roccat mice have this same problem with other Razer keyboards, it’d be a damn shame – they are both quite good manufacturers from my experience, minus this conflict.