Installed iCUE, now caps lock and num lock don't light up

[johnsilverstein]

I received a K55 keyboard as a Christmas present this year. I wanted a little bit more customization of the lighting, so I installed the iCUE software. After disconnecting and reconnecting the keyboard, I can now customize the main lighting areas of the keyboard. However, the Caps Lock and Num Lock keys no longer light up the appropriate LEDs at the top of the keyboard. The MR and Windows lock keys work just fine.

 

Another question: Why is iCUE using ~350MB RAM and a constant 0.3% CPU utilization on a 6th Gen Core i7 for some static lighting control of a single device? And why does iCUE need to occupy over 500MB disk storage? Personally, I'd rather have a lightweight set of command-line tools that I can use to execute from a scripting language of my choice to list attached devices, zones, and then set the colors of each zone. I don't really want/need rainbow/pulsing effects - just some basic, dim backlighting.

[johnsilverstein]

Uninstalling the iCUE software and unplugging the keyboard and then plugging it back in fixed the Caps Lock and Num Lock issue. I can live without buggy, bloated, poorly written software installed on my computer that breaks my hardware. Not knowing whether or not the Caps Lock is on is kind of a basic feature of a keyboard.

 

I've also looked at the CUE SDK over the past couple of days. It looks like the SDK requires iCUE to be installed to function, so my guess is that the included precompiled DLLs simply send window messages onto the iCUE interface. The DLLS are also slightly bloated (300KB is kind of chunky for a shim). There needs to be a "functional driver + CLI tools" option that doesn't require iCUE to be installed that's a ~2MB download that anyone can script (i.e. not just C/C++ developers). A 300MB download is crazy huge for what the software does (i.e. not much - it just sends signals to the lighting control chipset in various devices).