Worst. Headphones. Evar.
Posted on April 22nd, 2008 in Microsoft | No Comments »
The other day I got the bright idea to sign up for Skype. After all, I am a geek by trade and almost all geeks have a Skype account. Not wanting to feel left out I jumped on the bandwagon.
So I went to Staples and bought a Skype optimized headset from Logitech. It didn’t really work (the mic was way to short for my fat face) so I returned it and went to Best Buy where everyone knows the best electronics and computer equipment is sold. 
While there a headset from Microsoft caught my attention. It was the LifeChat LX 3000 and it looked pretty appealing.
Now before you call me a hypocrite know that the reason I chose Microsoft is that M$ has a way of making things that work with their own OS really well. I thought that since they made the headset it should work really well.
It did.
But not how I would have wanted it to.
See I installed Windows Live Messenger (because you have to install that before you install the software that drives the headset) then installed the headset driver software. Then I connected the headset. And turned on the sound.
The sound played. Through the speakers on my laptop. I did what the instructions in the headset manual said to do. But the sound still came from my computer rather than through my headset.
So I called M$ tech support and after about 30 minutes of trying to talk with a guy named Winston (Yeah right, his real was Sunil) I found out that the headset is designed in such a way as to become your default speakers. Yes, you heard that right. Microsoft expects you to use this headset as your default sound output handler. WTF?
After Sunil, er, Winston, remoted into my laptop and reset a bunch of settings to get the headset to play the sound, I told him I was going to remove the headset from the computer so I could listen to music from my computer. He told me I couldn’t do that without undoing all of the changes he just made. I told him I didn’t want to have to use the headset all the time but only when I wanted to make phone calls. He told me that was fine. As long as I changed my settings every time I connected the headset to my computer.
Thanks Microsoft.
Yes, the headset went straight back to Best Buy where I promptly traded them for a Plantronics headset. Which works as expected.