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Speed up your Logitech Harmony Remote

If your universal remote takes too long to turn everything on, try these tips.

Tom Merritt Former CNET executive editor
2 min read

Watch this: Speed up your Logitech Harmony Remote

I was mentioning on The Real Deal show the other day that my Logitech Harmony Remote takes a long time to turn on all my devices, meaning that sometimes some people in my family complain that it doesn't work right.

Laurence wrote in to point out you can change the latency settings on the Harmony and it should work better. Thanks, Laurence! Here's what's going on.

When you choose an action in the Harmony remote it plods through everything in the order you've told it, sending the commands by infrared with pauses in between each command. Turn on the TV, pause, turn on the speakers, pause, turn on the DVD player, pause, turn the TV to the DVD input, etc.

There's a default latency setting that defines how long that pause is. It's meant to make sure your device gets every command and runs it. Laurence shaved a few hundred milliseconds off his latency without issue, leading to much snappier performance.

Here's how to do it.

Hook up your remote to your computer just like you did when you set it up in the first place.

Launch the Logitech Software.

Go to a device, say the TV.

Click Troubleshooting.

Select "TV is responding too slowly" and click Next.

Change the number to a lower one. Here let's change 1000 milliseconds to 100.

Click next.

The software will make sure that setting isn't incompatible with any of your Activities. Click next until you're through checking everything. And click Done.

Select Yes to update the remote.

Once it's updated, disconnect the remote and try it.

Now this may cause other problems, like missed commands, so you might have to tweak the settings a couple of times to find the right latency setting for you.

But when you do, you'll have fewer complaints about your universal remote.