USB KVM’s?
on 04.03.05, 01:06pm in mac, windows • comments (5)
When I picked up my Mac Mini a few weeks back, I also invested in an IOGear MiniView USB KVM in order to have a simple solution to switch between my PC and the Mac.
Ugh, was I wrong. Seems like the KVM is not only partially responsible for the crappy video I’m seeing from the Mac (running at 1280×1024), I still can’t get the hotkey combination (pressing Scroll Lock twice or the advanced Num Lock/Minus/Num Lock) to work on my Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop Pro. The only way I can even get it to switch is to power down the PC, and fire up the Mac. Not an optimal solution by any means.
Does anyone have any suggestions, or recommendations on a decent USB/Audio/Video KVM that’s got a pretty small footprint??
macuser (April 3, 2005 @ 9:34 pm)
i found the MyPico2 KVM pretty good. i use it on my G5/Dell PowerEdge. i never had any problems switching between pc -> mac and mac ->pc. it dose’t support audio but who cares. the audio is crap off KVM’s anyway… just get a good amplifier with at lease 2 optical inputs and a 3.5 jack input (for your mac mini)
also what handy is DoubleCommand (Mac OS X) which lets you remap keys, in other words change the way your keyboard works it’s great for PC Guys instead of using Apple+C to copy you can use Ctrl+C and so on…. you can download it for free at SourceForge
http://doublecommand.sourceforge.net/
john (April 4, 2005 @ 2:27 pm)
here’s my experience — http://www.theludwigs.com/archives/001325.html — usb switching i found to be problematic and i gave up on it.
Tim (April 4, 2005 @ 2:56 pm)
That’s strange, I bought an IOGear Miniview 4 port KVM switch last week and it’s been great, although I’m using the PS/2 model to switch between several older machines without USB support. I’ve used the computers with and without the KVM switch and I haven’t noticed any loss of video quality at 1024×768.
ChrisCla (April 4, 2005 @ 4:54 pm)
Don’t get the Avocent SwitchView. I have it at work and it is absolutely horrible. It can’t remember the FLock and it uses CTRL-CTRL as the hotkey which causes havok when you are trying to cut and paste rapidly.
Frank McPherson (April 15, 2005 @ 7:09 pm)
I have an older Belkin OmniView SOHO USB/VGA switch for sharing with two computers that I use for my Dell desktop and Mac PowerBook. It shares the sound and microphone too.
The current version of what I have looks the same but supports more computers. I just noticed that they now have DVI support, which I am going to investigate since I just got a new 19″ Samsung SyncMaster 930B LCD monitor.