Recommend me a KVM switch

Calica

I work from home. I have two PCs (work and personal), dual DVI monitors, and one keyboard and mouse that use a total of two USB ports. I will never be using both computers at the same time; I just don't want to crawl under my desk to move cables around every time I switch.

The lowest price on Newegg for a switch with two monitor ports is around $200, which seems ridiculous unless I'm missing something. I can live with only being able to plug one monitor into the switch if it means not dropping a couple hundred dollars, but the price and user rating of switches vary wildly. Filtering them tends to return no results; so either my scenario is so incredibly niche that the solution doesn't exist (doubtful), or I'm using the filter options incorrectly.

Anyone have any suggestions/recommendations?

Naphtali

Calica wrote: »

I work from home. I have two PCs (work and personal), dual DVI monitors, and one keyboard and mouse that use a total of two USB ports. I will never be using both computers at the same time; I just don't want to crawl under my desk to move cables around every time I switch.

The lowest price on Newegg for a switch with two monitor ports is around $200, which seems ridiculous unless I'm missing something. I can live with only being able to plug one monitor into the switch if it means not dropping a couple hundred dollars, but the price and user rating of switches vary wildly. Filtering them tends to return no results; so either my scenario is so incredibly niche that the solution doesn't exist (doubtful), or I'm using the filter options incorrectly.

Anyone have any suggestions/recommendations?

If you don't mind using one monitor for each PC, you could use a wormhole switch hooked up between the two PCs which will let you share keyboard/mouse/clipboard between the two machines. It's a much cheaper option as well ($40).

Calica

Naphtali wrote: »

Calica wrote: »

I work from home. I have two PCs (work and personal), dual DVI monitors, and one keyboard and mouse that use a total of two USB ports. I will never be using both computers at the same time; I just don't want to crawl under my desk to move cables around every time I switch.

The lowest price on Newegg for a switch with two monitor ports is around $200, which seems ridiculous unless I'm missing something. I can live with only being able to plug one monitor into the switch if it means not dropping a couple hundred dollars, but the price and user rating of switches vary wildly. Filtering them tends to return no results; so either my scenario is so incredibly niche that the solution doesn't exist (doubtful), or I'm using the filter options incorrectly.

Anyone have any suggestions/recommendations?

If you don't mind using one monitor for each PC, you could use a wormhole switch hooked up between the two PCs which will let you share keyboard/mouse/clipboard between the two machines. It's a much cheaper option as well ($40).

I need both monitors for work, unfortunately.

Maybe what I'm looking for isn't a KVM at all? The use-case for KVMs seems to be switching between multiple machines that are powered on, but I don't need to do that. I just want an easier way to, essentially, move hardware peripherals between two completely unrelated PCs. They don't need to communicate.

Calica

I ended up ordering a USB switch, a couple of DVI to VGA converters, and cables so I can plug my home PC's DVI outputs into the monitors' VGA inputs.

This is so dumb. Why isn't a simple hardware DVI switch a thing? *sigh*