Plan for Joel Baxter
by Joel Baxter · 11/14/2002 (12:06 am) · 13 comments
The Daily for Nov 13 2002:
"Hopefully not ALL of tomorrow tho." ... hoo hah, I should have known better than to say that.
Welp, I got most of my office logistics sorted out until I was left with this: I needed a kvm switch so I could run my Win98 desktop workstation and my WinXP laptop (when docked) off of the same keyboard, video monitor, and mouse. My third system, a low-horsepower Linux server, can chug away on its own with only occasional direct access through an "emergency quality" set of keyboard/monitor/mouse.
I hadn't really paid attention to the wonderful world of kvm switches before, so I needed to do some online research and poll friends for opinion. Turns out that you can get a good kvm switch (say, Linksys) for pretty cheap... if you're using a PS/2 mouse and PS/2 keyboard. If you're a USB aficionado, expect to pay 2 or 3 times as much. Me, I won't go back to a PS/2 mouse. And it seems to be not very forward-thinking to lock myself in to PS/2 peripherals for the foreseeable future. I decided to bite the financial bullet and go with a USB kvm switch.
So, armed with knowledge of some reputable brands and particular models, off to Fry's I went this afternoon. That was back when I was innocent and naive... it seems so long ago now. Let's draw a merciful veil over this section of my day and just summarize it as: a trip to Fry's, a purchase, return home, another trip to Fry's, a refund, return home, a trip to CompUSA, swing by Fry's on the way back home. Guh.
I ended up with a Belkin F1DS102U ("OmniView SOHO Series 2-Port KVM Switch with Audio, USB Platform"). Kinda high-end but my only real choice unless I was willing to spend the time -- and the risk of refund/return hassles -- on mail order. If there had been USB IOGEAR kvm switches available in the stores, I would have tried those as a lower-cost alternative, but no luck.
I also grabbed the necessary 2 VGA cables and 2 USB cables, and a Logitech USB keyboard. My current keyboard is PS/2, and it's on its last legs, and a USB-PS/2 keyboard adapter was $25 ... seemed reasonable just to get the new keyboard for $30. But it was a good thing I still had my old one around, as we shall see. (Dum dum DUMMM!)
I'm waffling on how much of the installation process to describe here. You'd probably think I was making stuff up. I'll limit myself to three anecdotes:
- Before you set up the switch for use, you have to USB-connect it to each machine individually to allow that computer to recognize the device and install the appropriate drivers. Since there are only 2 USB ports on each of my systems, this would have been a little annoying if I didn't have a PS/2 keyboard handy, but fortunately I did. As if regretting that it missed a chance to irritate me, the switch decided to beep loudly and repetitively through the entire process. The Final Indignity was when I had it harnessed to my Win98 system and it began demanding the Win98 CD. Which of course I had misplaced. But anyway, half an hour or so later and this was all taken care of. Then the real installation process could get started.
- Most of the fun and games centered around the modern miracle of Plug 'n' Play, but there was one goof-up that was purely physical. The male VGA cable connectors on the switch have a threaded standoff on each side of the connector, to receive a screw. So, as it happens, do the female connectors of the VGA cables I bought, which as you can imagine interferes with the plugging action just a wee bit (this incompatibility, BTW, is particularly amusing considering that the cables are also Belkin brand). So I unscrewed the standoffs from the switch ... not much else I could do other than go shopping again for a compatible set of cables (and pay thru the nose again). This means of course that there are no screws holding those cables in place, with the result that I can't cram the switch cover on to hide the cables and make it look pretty, 'cause that would unseat the VGA connectors.
- Finally, once everything was hooked up, my laptop was able to receive keyboard/mouse input but my desktop was not. The screen from the desktop system showed a "no mouse found" dialog, and the mouse pointer would not move, and keyboard input was also ignored. The solution? Plug the ol' PS/2 keyboard back in and press Return to dismiss the dialog. At which point the OS finished booting and loaded up yet another USB mouse driver, and the mouse (and keyboard) began to work. Apparently, the mouse as filtered through the switch looks different than the mouse directly connected, requiring a different driver. Why the keyboard was being ignored I don't know, altho I have some guesses.
So, was it worth it? Yeah. There were several problems with my office setup that were preventing me from using my desktop system at all, much less using it at the same time as my docked laptop. That's taken care of now. It looks like I'll also be able to easily share my USB printer through the switch.
Couple of quirks I've noticed:
- When you switch systems, your mouse and keyboard are effectively unplugged from one system and then plugged into the other system. This results in a bit of delay before you can start using them (a second or two) as the system has to recognize the devices. I don't know if this is endemic of USB kvm switches or just a Belkin thing. Not a problem for me as I won't be switching frequently.
- I've noticed a picture quality issue, where a black section on a white background leaves faint, light-colored ghosts to the right of it. This is not an entirely new phenomenon on my monitor, but it is more pronounced now. Obviously I don't know yet if this is a switch issue or an $11-cable issue... looks like I'll get that chance to go VGA cable shopping again after all. (A Slashdot article about kvm switches, which I just now ran across, has some comments about the importance of cable quality.)
Anyway... sigh. It's good to have my office reorg done, but bad that it ate my day; didn't even get a chance yet to set up Torque and Grav on my desktop system, although I'll probably do that before I hit the sack.
(A positive postscript: my office, and our home LAN in general, relies on Netgear ethernet hubs and an ORiNOCO RG-1000 wireless access point, and they were painless to install and work great. So I don't have any stories to tell about them. :-) )
"Hopefully not ALL of tomorrow tho." ... hoo hah, I should have known better than to say that.
Welp, I got most of my office logistics sorted out until I was left with this: I needed a kvm switch so I could run my Win98 desktop workstation and my WinXP laptop (when docked) off of the same keyboard, video monitor, and mouse. My third system, a low-horsepower Linux server, can chug away on its own with only occasional direct access through an "emergency quality" set of keyboard/monitor/mouse.
I hadn't really paid attention to the wonderful world of kvm switches before, so I needed to do some online research and poll friends for opinion. Turns out that you can get a good kvm switch (say, Linksys) for pretty cheap... if you're using a PS/2 mouse and PS/2 keyboard. If you're a USB aficionado, expect to pay 2 or 3 times as much. Me, I won't go back to a PS/2 mouse. And it seems to be not very forward-thinking to lock myself in to PS/2 peripherals for the foreseeable future. I decided to bite the financial bullet and go with a USB kvm switch.
So, armed with knowledge of some reputable brands and particular models, off to Fry's I went this afternoon. That was back when I was innocent and naive... it seems so long ago now. Let's draw a merciful veil over this section of my day and just summarize it as: a trip to Fry's, a purchase, return home, another trip to Fry's, a refund, return home, a trip to CompUSA, swing by Fry's on the way back home. Guh.
I ended up with a Belkin F1DS102U ("OmniView SOHO Series 2-Port KVM Switch with Audio, USB Platform"). Kinda high-end but my only real choice unless I was willing to spend the time -- and the risk of refund/return hassles -- on mail order. If there had been USB IOGEAR kvm switches available in the stores, I would have tried those as a lower-cost alternative, but no luck.
I also grabbed the necessary 2 VGA cables and 2 USB cables, and a Logitech USB keyboard. My current keyboard is PS/2, and it's on its last legs, and a USB-PS/2 keyboard adapter was $25 ... seemed reasonable just to get the new keyboard for $30. But it was a good thing I still had my old one around, as we shall see. (Dum dum DUMMM!)
I'm waffling on how much of the installation process to describe here. You'd probably think I was making stuff up. I'll limit myself to three anecdotes:
- Before you set up the switch for use, you have to USB-connect it to each machine individually to allow that computer to recognize the device and install the appropriate drivers. Since there are only 2 USB ports on each of my systems, this would have been a little annoying if I didn't have a PS/2 keyboard handy, but fortunately I did. As if regretting that it missed a chance to irritate me, the switch decided to beep loudly and repetitively through the entire process. The Final Indignity was when I had it harnessed to my Win98 system and it began demanding the Win98 CD. Which of course I had misplaced. But anyway, half an hour or so later and this was all taken care of. Then the real installation process could get started.
- Most of the fun and games centered around the modern miracle of Plug 'n' Play, but there was one goof-up that was purely physical. The male VGA cable connectors on the switch have a threaded standoff on each side of the connector, to receive a screw. So, as it happens, do the female connectors of the VGA cables I bought, which as you can imagine interferes with the plugging action just a wee bit (this incompatibility, BTW, is particularly amusing considering that the cables are also Belkin brand). So I unscrewed the standoffs from the switch ... not much else I could do other than go shopping again for a compatible set of cables (and pay thru the nose again). This means of course that there are no screws holding those cables in place, with the result that I can't cram the switch cover on to hide the cables and make it look pretty, 'cause that would unseat the VGA connectors.
- Finally, once everything was hooked up, my laptop was able to receive keyboard/mouse input but my desktop was not. The screen from the desktop system showed a "no mouse found" dialog, and the mouse pointer would not move, and keyboard input was also ignored. The solution? Plug the ol' PS/2 keyboard back in and press Return to dismiss the dialog. At which point the OS finished booting and loaded up yet another USB mouse driver, and the mouse (and keyboard) began to work. Apparently, the mouse as filtered through the switch looks different than the mouse directly connected, requiring a different driver. Why the keyboard was being ignored I don't know, altho I have some guesses.
So, was it worth it? Yeah. There were several problems with my office setup that were preventing me from using my desktop system at all, much less using it at the same time as my docked laptop. That's taken care of now. It looks like I'll also be able to easily share my USB printer through the switch.
Couple of quirks I've noticed:
- When you switch systems, your mouse and keyboard are effectively unplugged from one system and then plugged into the other system. This results in a bit of delay before you can start using them (a second or two) as the system has to recognize the devices. I don't know if this is endemic of USB kvm switches or just a Belkin thing. Not a problem for me as I won't be switching frequently.
- I've noticed a picture quality issue, where a black section on a white background leaves faint, light-colored ghosts to the right of it. This is not an entirely new phenomenon on my monitor, but it is more pronounced now. Obviously I don't know yet if this is a switch issue or an $11-cable issue... looks like I'll get that chance to go VGA cable shopping again after all. (A Slashdot article about kvm switches, which I just now ran across, has some comments about the importance of cable quality.)
Anyway... sigh. It's good to have my office reorg done, but bad that it ate my day; didn't even get a chance yet to set up Torque and Grav on my desktop system, although I'll probably do that before I hit the sack.
(A positive postscript: my office, and our home LAN in general, relies on Netgear ethernet hubs and an ORiNOCO RG-1000 wireless access point, and they were painless to install and work great. So I don't have any stories to tell about them. :-) )
About the author
#2
11/14/2002 (8:22 am)
The KVM I have has it's qwarks as well. if you hit CTRL twice it accesses a menu that allows you to switch between devices. so, if in game you hit CTRL twice to fast, you are hosed ;)
#3
Just to mention it...if you're looking for software that makes keeping daily notes easy, check out The Journal.
Yes, I wrote it, so I'm somewhat biased, but it's easier than using the GG plan interface. You could create your notes throughout the day, and then just copy-and-paste the whole entry into your plan or blog.
The Journal does considerably more than daily entries, though. You can make document entries that are arranged in an hierarchy, and even attach images and other Windows files (in the Loose-leaf categories). You can create links between entries. You can search the whole entry database.
Really. It's a cool little proggy. =)
-David
11/14/2002 (8:55 am)
Joel,Just to mention it...if you're looking for software that makes keeping daily notes easy, check out The Journal.
Yes, I wrote it, so I'm somewhat biased, but it's easier than using the GG plan interface. You could create your notes throughout the day, and then just copy-and-paste the whole entry into your plan or blog.
The Journal does considerably more than daily entries, though. You can make document entries that are arranged in an hierarchy, and even attach images and other Windows files (in the Loose-leaf categories). You can create links between entries. You can search the whole entry database.
Really. It's a cool little proggy. =)
-David
#4
Re: Journal. Sounds like a cool program, but needs an automatic "export to GG plan" feature...Joel's plan updates are what gets me out of bed in the morning ;)
11/14/2002 (9:15 am)
I've never seen a KVM switch that just worked. My belkin omni 4 port, for example, periodically resets the mouse port which makes sensitivity slow to a crawl, and I have to cycle through the ports to reset it. Re: Journal. Sounds like a cool program, but needs an automatic "export to GG plan" feature...Joel's plan updates are what gets me out of bed in the morning ;)
#6
It also came with all 4 cables needed to hook 4 computers up to it, usb/vga and they run as one cable with split ends, its great.
11/14/2002 (10:46 am)
My 4 port KVM IOGEAR miniview works great, no keyboard tricks just a button on it, it sits right next to my monitor. Only complaint i have is that it doesn't switch audio.It also came with all 4 cables needed to hook 4 computers up to it, usb/vga and they run as one cable with split ends, its great.
#7
Ron: I went to the Belkin site to see if they had a firmware update that might fix this problem, and I noticed that they did have a firmware update but the issues it fixed don't seem to include the key-repeat thing. One thing that firmware update did change was that it added the left control key as another hotkey for controlling the switch. Which (if that's not optional) would absolutely hose me in many games... as anyone who happened on a demonstration machine at IGC after I got through with it found out, my movement keys are pretty odd, and I use left control for "backwards". So if I end up being required to do a firmware update of some sort, and that hangs some sort of switch-related functionality on the control key, I'll just be exchanging one insurmountable problem for another. Sigh.
John: Now all we need is something to get me out of bed in the morning... as for the mouse sensitivity, no problems there yet, although in searching diligently for Belkin bug fixes last night I did come across reports of that. Perhaps it's only a problem with their PS/2 products. Geez, I had been under the impression that Belkin was among the more reliable brands... they're sure priced as if that were the case...
Chris: Hmm. Well, I'm not really interested in switching audio, so that's not an issue. If I end up having to take this Belkin doodad back to CompUSA, I'll probably just mail order an IOGEAR MiniView.
11/14/2002 (11:13 am)
David: I'll have a look. Currently I don't take many notes for this during the day, but that may change... the first few days of this experiment have been somewhat atypical, work-wise. :-)Ron: I went to the Belkin site to see if they had a firmware update that might fix this problem, and I noticed that they did have a firmware update but the issues it fixed don't seem to include the key-repeat thing. One thing that firmware update did change was that it added the left control key as another hotkey for controlling the switch. Which (if that's not optional) would absolutely hose me in many games... as anyone who happened on a demonstration machine at IGC after I got through with it found out, my movement keys are pretty odd, and I use left control for "backwards". So if I end up being required to do a firmware update of some sort, and that hangs some sort of switch-related functionality on the control key, I'll just be exchanging one insurmountable problem for another. Sigh.
John: Now all we need is something to get me out of bed in the morning... as for the mouse sensitivity, no problems there yet, although in searching diligently for Belkin bug fixes last night I did come across reports of that. Perhaps it's only a problem with their PS/2 products. Geez, I had been under the impression that Belkin was among the more reliable brands... they're sure priced as if that were the case...
Chris: Hmm. Well, I'm not really interested in switching audio, so that's not an issue. If I end up having to take this Belkin doodad back to CompUSA, I'll probably just mail order an IOGEAR MiniView.
#8
11/14/2002 (11:39 am)
One more thing Chris... do you experience the delay in recognizing the mouse/keyboard after switching? (Or any picture quality problems?)
#9
11/14/2002 (1:08 pm)
I also had some repeat rate problems with my belkin switch. I seem to recall that rebooting would fix it. But is an older ps2 model (no usb) so your case may be different.
#10
11/14/2002 (1:55 pm)
Well, it looks like the ghosting is probably a VGA cable issue. I connected the monitor cable directly to the VGA cable, bypassing the switch, and the ghosting became, if anything, worse. That doesn't of course prove that the signal quality would be fine through the switch if I had a good cable... we'll see about that.
#11
1) Try the firmware update just to see if it happens to fix anything. (As mentioned above: no thanks.)
2) Unplug the keyboard from the switch, plug a spare USB mouse or other device in there to keep the switch from beeping, then plug the keyboard into one of the two "other USB device" inputs. Since those are pass-thru inputs the keyboard behavior should not be affected (but, I would not be able to operate the switch via hotkey). This is kinda ingenious, but clunky... I'd end up with an extra mouse lying around, and one less USB device port, which is potentially bad seeing as how I have two other USB devices (a joystick and a printer).
So, I think it's back to CompUSA to take the 15% hit for their "opened box return" fee. I found another store sort-of nearby to CompUSA that has the IOGEAR switches -- and a nice returns policy -- so I'll try me one o' them. And get some better VGA cables.
11/14/2002 (2:47 pm)
The saga continues... I got Belkin tech support on the phone, and they had two suggestions:1) Try the firmware update just to see if it happens to fix anything. (As mentioned above: no thanks.)
2) Unplug the keyboard from the switch, plug a spare USB mouse or other device in there to keep the switch from beeping, then plug the keyboard into one of the two "other USB device" inputs. Since those are pass-thru inputs the keyboard behavior should not be affected (but, I would not be able to operate the switch via hotkey). This is kinda ingenious, but clunky... I'd end up with an extra mouse lying around, and one less USB device port, which is potentially bad seeing as how I have two other USB devices (a joystick and a printer).
So, I think it's back to CompUSA to take the 15% hit for their "opened box return" fee. I found another store sort-of nearby to CompUSA that has the IOGEAR switches -- and a nice returns policy -- so I'll try me one o' them. And get some better VGA cables.
#12
however, when I have it switched to my Mac, through a ps2-to-usb converter (Mac being usb-only now), I do sometimes lose key repeats and such, or have other keyboard 'loss', sometimes complete, only on the Mac though. PC still works perfect.
d
11/14/2002 (6:08 pm)
my old 2-port cheap-o IOGear PS2 switch is simply awesome. double-tap the Ctrl key (yeah, could suck for games -- so rebind it!), and it switches back and forth.however, when I have it switched to my Mac, through a ps2-to-usb converter (Mac being usb-only now), I do sometimes lose key repeats and such, or have other keyboard 'loss', sometimes complete, only on the Mac though. PC still works perfect.
d
#13
To recap:
Belkin switch $150, cables not included, very problematic.
IOGEAR switch $100, cables included, works like a charm.
Of course, the Belkin switch also has audio switching, and hotkey support, and a "stylish" (although larger) casing, but I don't really care about any of that.
I think the IOGEAR switch can be considered a happy ending, unless it suddenly explodes or something. Although, now I have two extra super-short USB cables and two extra dubious-quality VGA cables courtesy of my Belkin experiment, which is about $35 that I didn't need to spend ... but I guess you can never have too many cables on hand.
11/14/2002 (8:26 pm)
Well, I got the IOGEAR MiniView 2-port USB kvm switch. Not the MiniView II or MiniView III, just the original. It doesn't try to support any hotkey stuff ... I think it is purely pass-through USB, so all the devices appear to be working fine. Video quality is good as well (using the included cables). All around a nice widget, no complaints.To recap:
Belkin switch $150, cables not included, very problematic.
IOGEAR switch $100, cables included, works like a charm.
Of course, the Belkin switch also has audio switching, and hotkey support, and a "stylish" (although larger) casing, but I don't really care about any of that.
I think the IOGEAR switch can be considered a happy ending, unless it suddenly explodes or something. Although, now I have two extra super-short USB cables and two extra dubious-quality VGA cables courtesy of my Belkin experiment, which is about $35 that I didn't need to spend ... but I guess you can never have too many cables on hand.
Torque 3D Owner Joel Baxter
You can imagine how much fun this is in a game.
It also sucks when control-clicking to open links tabs in Mozilla ... you're holding down control and clicking on various links on a page, then all of a sudden the main page starts going to the link you clicked on because the control modifier vanished.
Time to see if Belkin's tech support is worth anything.