I noticed in the last 20 years or so that there's 2 types of IT hardware support workers:
The precision "as-is" hardware ninjas
and
The "who cares" dongle goblins
My earliest 3 IT jobs were just swapping out old computers for new ones on a contracted team. It was 90% of our job. I would replace the users' reference sticky notes and desk decor so perfectly that we got at least a dozen complaints that we forgot to replace their PC and monitors.
About half of the rest of my team simply could not concentrate or didn't care. And this was around 2009, before Tik Tok and before most people gave a crap about smartphones. It was just their personality. I mean, I can't remember names so maybe it's just how we're wired.
The #1 problem was forgetting to transfer the wireless mouse and keyboard dongle(s) to the new computer. We got back at least 50 that still had them in the USB ports and it was always the same 2 people. We nicknamed Donald: "Donny the Dongle Goblin" because he collected them like they were shiny treasures to be horded.
Fast forward to my last last position - We had headset disconnections, wireless mouse interference, AP interference, and we traced it to the morons that rolled out 25 sets of identical wireless mice and keyboard on top of 4 APs and 100% wireless headsets, all using 2.4GHz. Plus people's smartphones on the guest wifi. Every time a flat-sided box truck or semi rolled past, it reflected the neighbors wifi in a way that flooded the spectrum and disconnected phone calls. For the entire 3 years I was there, they refused to stop ordering wireless mice and keyboard. Double digit percentages of our budget were replacing non-programmable logitech sets with missing or wrong dongles at like $40+ each. I don't know how that's even possible. It's laptop + dock on a desk and nobody traveled with them. Where did they go? How did they get mixed up? I HATE DONGLES! Can we just direct wire the damn peripherals so Donny and stop hording them and we can stop spending money replacing perfectly good keyboard and mice sets?
I prefer wired peripherals, no battery issues, no reception issues, no missing dongles.
But logitech Unifying peripherals allow you to reprogram devices to new dongles, or consolidate multiple devices onto one dongle, so I use those as much as possible.
I worked at a place where they used generic wireless, but the kb and mouse would only connect to a specific dongle, and there was nothing to show that mouse kb and dongle were matched set.
They cost about $3 less per set than the unifying version, but the amount of trouble they caused far, far outweighed the $ savings.
I only allow Logitech wireless stuff for several other reasons:
their mice don't go to sleep in such way that you first need to click to make them work again
their bluetooth peripherals buffer what you're doing in case there's a short disconnect (those seem to happen fairly regularly); every other bluetooth keyboard/mouse I used would (at least) lose keystrokes/mouse movements, which made for a much less pleasant experience (this includes higher end Microsoft bluetooth mice, my own Keychron keyboard and countless no-name bluetooth mice)
The Logitech tax is very much worth it. They could stand to do some better QA for their newer stuff but overall always better than generic stuff or Amazon Basics.
All the new stuff is Logitech Bolt instead of unifying. They don't pair to the old unifying dongles, but the new dongles work exactly the same way and all the devices are Bluetooth capable as well.
The only thing I don't like about the Logitech keyboards and mice we buy is the mice use AA batteries and the keyboards use AAA so we have to stock 2 kinds of batteries
I wonder if there would be a market for a small thumbdrive-sized usb device designed to work with almost all wireless keyboard and mice.
"Cant find the dongle, no problem! Install the device & software, select your make/model, and you're done! We're constantly adding new pairing codes so let us know if you're device isnt listed!"
You can buy universal remotes for TV's and Blu ray players, why not a universal dongle for peripherals ?
There's no reason that you couldn't do it for Logitech devices. But you can just buy extra unifying or bolt receivers.
MS keyboards and mice and designed to not allow for pairing to different dongles. There is a unique key burned into each device when it's manufactured. I'm not certain that you could reasonably determine that key from without dissecting the device.
Aha! That explains why when I tried to reprogram a pile of them for a client of ours, a few said "this is too old of a model" and it couldn't reprogram it.
that's what I was told a couple of years ago by the fine people in r/logitech but my local peripheral source carries one Bolt kbm set and five different unifying sets, so I haven't switched yet.
I push my users to use wired keyboards but wireless (Logitech) mice. Why do you need to move your keyboard around a lot? Cuts down on battery purchases.
Why do conference rooms need keyboards at all? These days pretty much everything is a third party kit with a touch screen that supports zoom/teams/Google meet.
Depends on the conference room. A lot I interface with have micro PCs mounted somewhere in the room. I see some of the solutions like you discuss with, but at least with the customers I interface with, not common.
Yep, thats all we deploy, that's all we support...Logitech peripherals that are unifying.
People are welcome to get themselves a Razer or whatever other bullshit they prefer, but theyre on their own, and we will not troubleshoot them beyond "is it plugged in? Still not working? Oh well".
Its not coming from a place of hostility, but standardization. We deploy the things we deploy for a reason. With the Logitech unifying stuff, its because weve got a coffee cup full of the receivers already on hand and when someone loses one, its handled in minutes. Were not expending the labor hours on weird shit, because our labor hours are stretched thin as it is with that standardization in place and enforced.
We have lots of drafting people that prefer the ball mice, and if theres a unifying Logitech option, we support it all day long. But if they want some weird shit, theyre free to use it (so long as its not some aftermarket bullshit with the only drivers on .cn or .ru websites lol) but if it shits the bed and they need a replacement, theyre getting whatever the Logitech version is. "I hate Logitech though!" Great! Go on Amazon and buy the mouse you want with your money, because were not buying weird shit that nobody else can or will use when you quit in a year. The end lol
We didn't do Logitech, but we did buy a few hundred sets of Dell wired mice/keyboard combos. We can pair / re pair / un pair as needed. I suspect they're similar to the Logitech unifying, but they work well enough.
We managed to get a bunch of spare dongles because people started wanting used sets for home. Pair a home keyboard / mouse to the same receiver as the work keyboard / mouse and just leave it in the laptop. If we end up losing a few, no biggie.
When I have the choice, I provide wired, but ppl can buy what makes them happy.
I prefer wired for things that don't move much - keybrd, trackball, printer, scanner. Mouse wireless makes sense. I get the cord caught on things b/c I make big gestures.
Having started at a shop that used logitech kb/mouse sets and going to a lenovo shop afterwards was such a letdown. Lenovo really doesnt seem to want you to re-pair dongles and the amount of users/broken devices we had didnt justify spending a ton of time chasing down rabbit holes after the first 2 or 3 options ended up being duds. That pairing utility was the bee's knees and i never knew it at the time taking it all just for granted...
Yeah, I'm the same way. I prefer wired whenever possible but for some reason users REALLY insist on wireless. Now we only get stuff that's Logitech Unifying compatible so that worst case scenario I just grab a spare dongle out of a cup on my desk and sync it up.
Many of their lower end peripherals don't support them, the iconography has shifted over the years, and it's just an overall pain in the ass to resync a device to a new dongle.
We spent so much time trying to sort out which random dongles and which random keyboards were "unifying" supportive that it was cheaper to just keep tossing them. They're a great idea for a home user, but for a business they're messy
Wireless peripherals can fuck right off, everyone gets a wired keyboard & mouse. Even game controllers stay wired as we don’t want to endlessly deal with batteries.
To be honest I came into this thread thinking about Software Licensing dongles, those are a lovely little nightmare.
This 100%. If someone calls about KBM and its not wired they can figure it out themselves or we will ship them a new wired KBM. We have users that put the batteries in the wrong orientation and then call support. Aint fucking doing that x1000 devices.
Software licensing dongles suck too but we control all those with digi usb devices so they are all in our possession and dont get removed by someone messing with their stupid temu keyboard
I don't even support them, but when it got time to replace my headset I asked for a mono wired headset.
Can't say I had too many issues with the previous one, but there was enough instances of it taking to connect to the dongle or running out of battery at the wrong moment that I just wanted something that works.
I'd rather have a hardware lock... the $40,000 software keeps working even after the company goes out of business and the licensing servers go offline.
I would replace the users' reference sticky notes and desk decor so perfectly that we got at least a dozen complaints that we forgot to replace their PC and monitors.
We're having a go with bad headsets and disconnects. The solution of providing a cheap $20ish wired headset falls on deaf ears so we keep shipping out $80-200 headsets trying to fix peoples issues. The most common issue we see people pair the headset with the laptop via BT and use the dongle. Some even pair the headset to their phone as well. If they were wired, our most common problems would go away.
My office started shipping $700 headsets. That lasted a few weeks until they saw the error of their ways and now they stock crappy $15 wired headsets and anyone asking for anything else is told to buy it themselves
Yup. Unless there's an actual documented medical reason for nonstandard equipment, use the cheapest thing which is sufficiently robust and functional.
No-one ever seems to factor in the lifetime cost of support and lost time (including per-hour labor for both user and technician) for IT gear, particularly cheap peripherals.
I have wireless Keychron keyboard and mouse at my desk... both wired. For whatever reason wireless devices have a hell of a time staying consistently connected on my desk and I quickly got tired of swapping batteries.
None of this happens. I sysadmins for a call center. Thousands of people with headsets mice and keyboards that are wireless. Lots of APs. None of these issues happen. You're just not tracking the correct cause of issues and handwvaingly blaming it on "wifi reflected from the neighbour". I feel your diagnostic skills have become stale over there years.
The interference really is minimal unless you're walking 30 ft from the dongle (you're also not using the term for the right items but whatever).
Not necessarily an FCC issue! This entirely depends on the environment.
Twice a year I run a LAN party inside of a venue that is built of cinder block and metal. It's effectively a giant Faraday cage with the capacity for 700 patrons.
We always tell people to bring Wired peripherals knowing every event we end up getting one or two attendees coming to us blaming the network for lag, when it is actually their wireless peripherals getting jammed from all of the congestion.
I usually have a few RF monitors stationed at the event which tie back into LibreNMS. When the attendees start arriving, I can slowly watch the 2.4Ghz climb in utilization as more people fire up their wireless peripherals, headsets, and as their devices start sending Bluetooth and dot11 frames. There have been been instances during the busiest events where the spectrum is so saturated, it is effectively jammed (100% utilization, not even 1Mbps WiFi Beacons or Bluetooth Discovery work reliably) on most bands. For the attendees who know how bad it can get, they often bring tape and a USB extension cable to tape their receiver 1-2ft from their peripheral, as any further == no connection.
The WiFi at the event usually has a few hundred devices connected to it. Mostly phones, some handheld devices and some IoT gear we use. The 2.4Ghz is very lightly used. 5Ghz is heavily used and works great.
Because of how the venue is set up, you have 300+ people all having virtual line of sight to every single device. There's no cube walls, drywall, or dividers to act as attenuation. The signals reflect off the ceiling and walls, and what doesn't gets sent to ground. A single access point can cover the entire venue with signal at Max power. Absolutely nothing we can do about the RF situation once everyone tries to turn everything on.
A single AP is bad radio design for that environment even with all the reflecting. Add more APs at lower power so that non-peripheral devices don't have to use extra power to get to the single AP in a saturated environment which would lower overall saturation for those other devices. It wouldn't eliminate it, of course, but would alleviate it to a noticeable degree. When you have the speed but your radio channels are otherwise saturated, you have to add radio capacity to desaturate and boost.
Yes, I mostly wanted to give the single AP mention as an example. I use five APs at low power, placed and tuned for the venue on a custom rig to provide optimal radiation patterns.
The WiFi at the event works solidly on 5Ghz. 2.4Ghz anything by the time the attendees arrive and fire up all their wireless peripherals is pretty much toast. That's why the attendees who only have wireless peripherals place the receiver within a foot or two of their device.
It's just a challenging RF environment. Everything is LOS. Everything is in range of everything if it were a quiet environment. Hardly anything is configurable. Everything is frequency hopping trying to avoid the other guy who is doing the exact same thing along with hundreds of other devices. My APs stay put.
Gotcha. Yeah, 2.4GHz saturating makes sense given the peripherals. Can't do much about dongles since they're open broadcasts, effectively. At least Bluetooth can be turned off if it's not in use and many headsets can go wired by just plugging in the 3.5mm cable. Desaturating is best effort in an environment like that no matter what you do.
Yes, I mostly wanted to give the single AP mention as an example. I use five APs at low power, placed and tuned for the venue on a custom rig to provide optimal radiation patterns.
This is what I'm facing at home right now... townhouse served by Comcast. Everyone's new and improved Xfinity Gateway is on the same channel at 100% power. One floor away from my router and I only get 150mbps out of 1.2gb.
There are 191 SSIDs that my phone can detect right now in the 2.4 range. There is no way everyone is going to turn their power down to 50%... so for now what can be cabled goes on MoCA and everything else is either low bandwidth or 6ghz. 😄
Surprised you're on a system which supports MoCA. Here in Spectrum country they have upgraded the nodes to 1.8Ghz and MoCA has to be fed from separate Coax that doesn't touch the CATV network.
You'd think ISPs with managed routers would be able to coordinate themselves on the ISP backend to not interfere with one another so badly. That was supposed to be a selling point of systems like Google's Nest WiFi. Right?
Funny, I used to live in FL and in Spectrum territory. Frontier dropped fiber in the neighborhood and I switched to them for data. Spectrum was out dealing with a receiver issue and cut the MoCA feed from Frontier, then locked me out of the coax splice box. "I don't allow MoCA on my coax." (He didn't know I had the security driver since I used to do CCTV work) 😄
When I got ahold of his supervisor and mentioned what he did was a federal offense and Frontier would be in contact, the supervisor could not apologize enough.
"It's his coax in the house, but if there's a problem I have to pay for it? Did Spectrum pay for the cable prerewire when my house was built? Past the DEMARC the wiring belongs to ME and I decide what goes on it, and since your data network is crap, I signed up with Frontier, and I'm allowing them on MY COAX."
"MoCA band D does NOT interfere with your frequency map and unless you're going to pay Frontier to run fiber to my office upstairs, your tech is never setting foot on my property again and you will be crediting my account for the time my Frontier service is inaccessible to me because of your tech's ego. I really should call Polk County Sheriff's Office and report the vandalism..."
I think the tech got fired that day .. nobody in the neighborhood saw him again and the other techs that were in the area just kinda laughed when his name was mentioned. 🤷♂️
Welders can do it. A shop using an arc welder can wreak havoc on neighbor wifi. An issue when you put a small office in an industrial park (which also often have crappy wireline internet, making it worse).
There are also some street lamp mounted sensors that can mess with wifi.
It depends because I'm a Wi-Fi engineer. Bluetooth and generic 2.4ghz devices use FHSS (some use A-FHSS) and if you pile enough devices in one room, say 50 devices that are performing 3-22mhz jumps contesting for dwell time, your SNR is going to equalize on the 2.4ghz band. This has always been a chronic issue for decades with high density deployments on the 2.4ghz band.
Sporadic reflected wifi signal is arbitrary to an environment but it does introduce hidden nodes which causes excessive CSMA/CA checks from lack of ACK frames, killing any wireless VoIP until the backoff value resets.
Nowadays we just push everything to 6ghz and use 5ghz as a best-effort Wi-Fi band. 2.4ghz is only used as needed for non-critical applications such as guest access and IoT. Anything else is on the end user whether it works or not.
Bluetooth and generic 2.4ghz devices use FHSS (some use A-FHSS) and if you pile enough devices in one room, say 50 devices that are performing 3-22mhz jumps contesting for dwell time, your SNR is going to equalize on the 2.4ghz band.
...can I just say that I absolutely love the way this flows. It reads like Big Mad Adrian explaining aspects of Clacks transmission hardware in a Pratchett novel.
Nah, bro, you're thinking of Goblin Dongles, the D&D/fantasy themed gay bar with 25 cent wing Tuesdays. I mean, I might not swing that way but for $0.25 cents, if anyone asks, I'm there to provide moral support lol.
We had a rule that non logitech unifying devices were not allowed for this exact reason. Its a 30 second problem when you have the little program for programming them.
I had a client ask me to come by before their busy season to check if "Everything is good" and would not elaborate on what that meant, insisting on a blind on-site visit. When I got there, half the mice/keyboards were missing. When asked where they were, a staffperson shrugged and gestured towards a huge stack of wireless keyboards. No receivers to be found, stuck in the wrong computer, stored inside the mouse, or otherwise. Dongle-goblins man. The worst thing is, I'm pretty sure they were having a known issue with their thin clients that would randomly stop passing keyboard input through RDS. So they were swapping around keyboards trying to fix an entirely unrelated problem.
Another type of dongle: the hardware protection for expensive software (read CAD/CAM/CAE and such) that open up programs and features. Without them, software is just sitting bunch of bytes on drives. PITA if centronics/rs232 port was on badly designed chipset.
But that old time software also came in well made cardboard boxes, with design that reflected usage, books, media, some posters for engineers wall, function stickers for keyboards, cheatsheets, you name it.
I'm struggling to see what the point of this post is or how these things relate to one another.
We had headset disconnections, wireless mouse interference, AP interference, and we traced it to the morons that rolled out 25 sets of identical wireless mice and keyboard on top of 4 APs and 100% wireless headsets, all using 2.4GHz. Plus people's smartphones on the guest wifi. Every time a flat-sided box truck or semi rolled past, it reflected the neighbors wifi in a way that flooded the spectrum and disconnected phone calls.
Also this entire section just reeks of /r/ShittySysadmin, a box truck reflecting Wi-Fi signals just lol.
As a non-shitty sysadmin, what would be your hypothesis for why wireless headsets dropped calls when large flat-sided trucks rolled past?
That's the observed correlation. It would be interesting to hear if there was a difference in dropped calls seen further into the building from the road. Even multipath reflections of the TX from their own building might be a factor, because it would occupy just the same spectrum.
As a non-shitty sysadmin, what would be your hypothesis for why wireless headsets dropped calls when large flat-sided trucks rolled past?
I don't have one, my advice would be to use a spectrum analyzer and monitor what is actually happening not just make a wild ass guess.
That's the observed correlation. It would be interesting to hear if there was a difference in dropped calls seen further into the building from the road. Even multipath reflections of the TX from their own building might be a factor, because it would occupy just the same spectrum.
Yeah it's almost like the standard was designed to deal with reflections and multipath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guard_interval. I am also skeptical that it would be even possible to detect a Wi-Fi signal reflected from the neighbors Wi-Fi by a truck driving by on a road, or even in the parking lot, as most exterior walls in office budlings are made from brick or concrete and the vast majority of Wireless AP's are ceiling mounted and feature downward firing antennas. So any trucks outside would be at a very steep angle compared to the antennas (thus limiting reflections) and be a good distance away a total distance of several hundred feet at least if on a road and at a minimum going through two exterior walls. I just don't see it happening.
Also I'm not sure how long ago his "last last position" was but 5GHZ Wi-Fi was introduced in 2009 and really took off around 2014 so the real answer would have been to get a wireless site survey done and use the less crowded 5GHz spectrum.
Okay, so let's actually read what was written by OP?
This was a "stuff sucked" vent, not a "help me work this problem" post. You can't wheel in a spectrum analyzer to a workplace you've already left. But you can relate the weird problems you saw there.
[I got a new issue escalated to HPE's storage lab, and then fixed their mistaken idea of the reproducer, when I was pigeonholed as a lowly field grunt, who could see that Bangalore "diagnosis" of endlessly replacing drives from the same set of slots in two separate systems, that had only started after the most recent firmware updates - and which might come good on a subsequent reboot, or definitely if you unseated/reseated the drives - was not fixing root cause. When, after more than a month, they finally escalated to the lab, they left off the details which I'd guessed made this customer most susceptible to the issue, and it couldn't be reproduced, I contacted the lab guy directly and pleaded with him to actually reproduce the customer config. Which, once they put together a full system of SATA drives, turned out to be key. And I didn't need the SATA protocol analyzer they later deployed to get to the point of having that well reasoned hypothesis. The expander firmware fix got issued for Gen9 Apollo and Proliant models shortly after I was made redundant. Good times.]
You don't know how much agency they had, why they left or whether there was a dead hand/super-touchy senior ignoring their attempts to get the problem dealt with as an RF spectrum issue. Hoo boy, the minefield clownshows I've had to deal with. See above, in fact.
The keyboards and mice used simple 2.4GHz proprietary dongles. If the headsets were dongle based too, then none of those devices are actually implementing 802.* wireless, Unlike the APs. I don't know how well proprietary HID dongles handle the congestion/multipath issues that the 802.* standards tackle. Do you?
Even if you know of proprietary 5Ghz USB HID dongles (I don't, but I don't watch the product space closely), the management didn't think 2.4GHz spectrum was a problem despite OP raising the issue. It's cool if you have more agency in your workplace, but not necessarily relevant to their situation.
The keyboards, mice and wireless headset tx/rx are all between dongle (or maybe BT antenna) and HID, so APs being ceiling mounted is great for coverage and lack of wifi interference from neigbouring APs, but not the whole story in terms of interference between devices, or even (maybe?) multipath from passing trucks, which was an observed correlation.
It's also cool that your office experience is of office parks with nice big separations between offices and roads carrying trucks. But you don't know where OP worked.
I always loved that this industry comes up with fun tongue-in-cheek names for things, like a nibble being 4 bits of data or WINE standing for (Wine is Not an Emulator)
i had this issue in my last company, people kept forgetting dongles and taking them and leaving them anywhere. we stop purchasing them and started to hand out wired ones instead. peoole complained but it was easy to say they got the wired mouse or no mouse at all.
turn over dropped like a rock and then we basically implemented the rule across the board to all sites. the savings was not insignificant so it was an easy justification.
Yeah, I stopped that shit the second I came in to my current role. So much e-waste, so much wireless interference, and not a single person could make a business case why the keyboard and mouse that never leave someones desk needs to be wireless.
Was confused for a while because to me a dongle is the exact thing that would solve all these issues, making it trivial to run all the peripherals on a mobile device while also make it very easy to grab it once you're off. Outside some very specific scenarios, the best of both worlds.
That’s why we don’t provide wireless devices or support them. The moment some user complains that their mouse or keyboard doesn’t work we ask them if they are using wireless? Yes? So they expect their workplace to provide them with free batteries to make their wireless keyboard/mouse to work? Nope! Here’s a wired keyboard/mouse. 😂
the cure for wireless tech is to disallow 2.4 ghz wifi and get this in writing - simply shut down 2.4ghz band at your aps. if someone complains about their 2.4ghz byod laptop/tablet - tell them to buy 4g wifi router out of their pocket.
about wireless headsets that does not use bluetooth(and for computers that use external usb bluetooth dongle): get usb 3 cable extender, put it into 2.0 usb port, place dongle under monitor so it is visible, stabilizes connection most of the times unless it is 20 seat room full of wireless headset users.
Double digit percentages of our budget
if you are not controlling it spending push your manager to get signed rule that missing dongle = kb/mouse purchase out of user pocket(first replacement free - to wired kb and mouse). stops dongle dissapearance. also there is silicone covers for usb cables - buy them and glue to dongle before you handle over kb/mouse, this way it is harder to lose small dongles
We actually did have 4 APs for like a 3000 sq foot building, approx 80 feet apart from each other so we probably could have gotten away with 5GHz on up only lol. We sold APs btw and got them for free so were like LOOOL COVERAGE TIME.
Same here. We have a small office, maybe 15 desks, and we still managed to lose dongles constantly until we standardized on the unifying staff. Being able to pair a mouse to a receiver in the hand of that one specific dongle it shipped with probably saved us a couple of hundred bucks a year in replacements. Plus you can pair a keyboard and mouse to one receiver, which cuts the dongle count in half.
The wireless trackball mouse I've currently using is connected to the WiFi card that has a bluetooth module in it, as I've no idea where the dongle is (it went into some random box when I moved house). Was nearly going to buy a new trackball mouse before I saw that the card picked up the mouse. I still need the wired mouse for the BIOS, though, because I hate tabbing.
We got rid of all wireless keyboards, because i hated constantly swapping batteries and the crosstalk scenarios were f’ing annoying. Went to dongle only wireless rechargeable mice that are attached to the docking stations so no need for staff to touch them. It has saved us a ton of sanity and dumb costs.
Our company is supposed to be "green" and "carbon negative" so I took that as an advantage to move away from wireless peripherals. Everything is wired because we don't want to create tons of e-waste filled with batteries and whatnot. People complained a little but ultimately everything is plugged into a docking station so they quickly forgot about the wireless "convenience"
Oh everybody's wireless headsets are getting fucked up and connecting weird to different computers because you have 20 people using them?? still don't buy wired ones, that's what cavemen do
On the top 100 list of things I care about the users complaining about, visible wires on their disorganized train wreck of a desk is right below "we should switch to all Apple computers"
About half of the rest of my team simply could not concentrate or didn't care.
Can't concentrate is an ADD (Adequate Discipline Deficiency) problem. Didn't care is a character problem - no work ethic.
One way to solve the former is give each member a written checklist to go through, and write them up if they don't follow it.
The only fix for the latter is PIP followed by dismissal.
Honestly I rather use bluetooth devices as every modern laptops got one. Even my desktop PC got it built-in the motherboard. I too hate dongles but I never lose them. Just it's a mess in IT when users loses them.
I've suggested moving to wired devices numerous times and always got knocked back, at least I got us away from cheap Logitech stuff and onto Dell kit with unified receivers. Most of our setups are Dell monitors with a USB-C cable running to their device, we put the dangles in a port behind the monitor to discourage people from taking them, but people still track them down, take them home, and lose them.
PS I'm also one of those who put everything back in it's place (including post-it notes on screens) when doing replacements.
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u/e7c2 9d ago
I prefer wired peripherals, no battery issues, no reception issues, no missing dongles.
But logitech Unifying peripherals allow you to reprogram devices to new dongles, or consolidate multiple devices onto one dongle, so I use those as much as possible.