I will admit to having a weakness for quality PC peripherals, from mechanical keyboards to 4K monitors and everything in between. I recently decided to take a dive into the Cult of Razer by overhauling my mismatched setup of variously branded bits and unify everything under the 3 snakes.
The hardware has been great, although I’ll admit to some of the tradeoffs being a bit frustrating at times. For example, the Huntsman Elite ships with ABS keycaps, so I spent the first day with my new device popping off their ABS caps and replacing as many of them as I could with PBT caps, since those take a beating a bit better. The issue here is that the Razer layout isn’t *quite* standard — specifically the bottom row of keys. I ended up just replacing the alphanumeric keys, since those were the most abused, and since the font between the PBT and ABS caps is similar, it’s tough to see the difference unless you’re up very close.
However, this post isn’t about selling you the Huntsman Elite. If you like Razer and are in the market for a mechanical keyboard, chances are you’ve already read plenty of articles on it. If you’ve bought one of these already, and you’re like me, you may end up with a peculiar issue with the media keys…
They don’t seem to work when Synapse 3 is open, but they do when it’s closed.
After doing some digging, the problem is a simple one to fix, even if it’s a bit curious as to why it happened this way in the first place…
- Exit all Razer apps. This includes killing the Razer service.
- Open the folder “%PROGRAMDATA%\Razer\Synapse3\Service\Bin\Devices”
- If you are affected by this issue, most likely there will be a folder in there called “Jamie T1”. Rename this folder to “Huntsman Elite” and restart the PC.
- Your media keys should now work, even when Synapse is open!
Anthony Turner 