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 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 and with 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 isn't incompatible with any of your Activities. Click next until your 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 times to find the right latency setting for you. But when you do, you'll have fewer complaints about your universal remote. I'm Tom Merritt, CNET.com