Software

As always, using Armoury Crate turned out to be a real thrill ride. Before installation would even commence, Armoury Crate wanted me to restart my system. After that, the installation still took a decent while, but ultimately succeeded. After launching Armoury Crate, another round of updating for connected devices was in order. At last, after just 20 minutes of installation action, Armoury Crate could finally be used. Unfortunately, Armoury Crate still has the habit of randomly discovering new updates, so be prepared for several extra rounds of update action. Curiously, upon installing Armoury Crate a second time later on, the restart at the start wasn't necessary.

Much like in Armoury II, the available settings are distributed across several tabs. The first page houses button-remapping functions, which allow one to rebind all but the left button to mouse, keyboard, multimedia, or macro functions. The second page includes options for CPI adjustment (100–12,000 CPI, increments of 100, four steps), polling rate (125, 250, 500, or 1000 Hz), and angle snapping (on/off). The third page gives access to several power-saving settings. One can set the minimum battery level at which a low battery warning is displayed through the RGB lighting, although this setting is essentially defunct since the M4 Wireless completely lacks illumination. Furthermore, one can define after how many minutes the mouse enters power-saving mode. Battery status is seemingly displayed in increments of 1%; in addition to that, after having closed Armoury Crate, the charge status can be displayed by clicking on the Armoury Crate icon on the system tray. Lastly, profile management and a macro editor are available as well.

All settings are updated live and saved to the on-board memory, so the software does not need to be running (or be installed) all the time. On my system, the software had a RAM footprint of 240 MB on average when running in the foreground and 113 MB when minimized. Upon exiting the application, several processes with a RAM footprint of 103 MB keep running. Please note that the number of active processes and their associated RAM footprint will depend on one's system configuration.

In order to ease uninstalling Armoury Crate, ASUS released a tool specifically for that. Using this tool instead of uninstalling all Armoury Crate modules individually is highly recommended since it indeed wipes almost everything related to Armoury Crate off the system. Only a few derelict folders are left on C: drive and within AppData/Local, which are easily removed manually. That said, I found that in some cases, not only scheduled tasks, but also several services manage to escape their uninstall tool. The easiest way to get rid of those is to open the services application and search for any ASUS-related entries. After stopping those, note their short names. Then, open an elevated command prompt and enter "sc delete servicename" without any quotes and servicename being the short name of the service in question. Afterwards, it is recommended to purge the entire ASUS folder found within the task scheduler.

Battery Life

The M4 Wireless can be operated either with a single AA or a single AAA-battery. Expected battery life thus will not only depend on settings and connectivity, but on battery capacity as well. According to ASUS, when using an Alkaline AA-battery, a battery life of 134 hours in 2.4 GHz mode and 232 hours in Bluetooth can be expected. Using an Alkaline AAA-battery, the figures are 53 hours and 100 hours, respectively.

Armoury Crate includes a percentage-based battery status indicator. While the indicator seemingly displays single-digit precision, I am confident that this is not the case. After continuously using the M4 Wireless with an AAA-battery for 10 hours, the indicator stood at 94%, which is completely impossible given the values cited by ASUS. Accordingly, I'm inclined to believe the numbers displayed by the battery status indicator are essentially made up and best ignored entirely.

After not moving the mouse for a user-configurable amount of time, the M4 Wireless enters a rest state from which it can be woken up by either moving the mouse or clicking any button.