A poor choice among many poor choices
Pros:
Universal cables included
Cons:
Performance, never rock solid for me, degrades over time
The Bottom Line:
It tends to insert random characters -- I had problems with other USB switches but this one has gotten worse over time.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
When I added an Apple Powerbook to my two Windows machines I went hunting for a 4 port USB KVM switch. The result was disastrous -- most KVM switches had real problems with the Powerbook. High-quality, well shielded cabling didn't seem to help much. After hunting for something that would work with the Powerbook at all, I eventually ended up with the IOGear Miniview Extreme.
My initial impression of the IOGear was that it was decent. It basically worked, with the occasional odd hiccup (like inserting an 's' into what I was typing). Now, nearly a year later, I have a longer term view -- and it's awful.
The IOGear has steadily degraded to the point that using it is very unpleasant. Inserting random characters has become far more common, and more annoyingly, it's developed a tendency to play a little game with me -- fairly often, after selecting a line of text, the cursor will immediately race up or down 10 lines or so, causing me to delete whatever random line it ends up on.
The features are fine -- hot key switching (although I would have preferred something more straightfoward, like double-tapping control to step through the active devices), it's own unified cable (one connection to the IOGear for each device), looks like there's even an audio jack.
The performance is not fine. Based on my experience, I'd recommend trying any other switches you can, leaving this as a last resort.
