I’ve set up a KVM switch to work with my PC desktop on circuit No. 1 and my Apple laptop on No. 2. The PC works fine, but when I switch over to my Mac, it doesn’t seem to be working properly. Anyone have experience with this kind of thing?
When you say “not working” is it a problem of the KVM doesn’t read and act on the appropriate keypress to toggle, or the Mac doesn’t respond to the keyboard/mouse or display video properly on the monitor?
The KVM toggles and I get something like a version of the display on the Mac, although it seems to be shifted way off. If I go back to the Mac and move things around with the touchpad, I see that I can make a window appear on the shared monitor by moving it way off to the right. The icons do not appear on the shared monitor. The mouse/cursor doesn’t appear on the shared monitor and moving it doesn’t seem to affect the mouse/cursor on the laptop monitor either. The only thing that seems to be appearing is the backdrop/tabletop
If you boot the Mac with the external monitor attached directly, is the display OK? If not, then the problem is with the monitor.
If it is OK, it’s possible that the monitor can’t manage the mode switching needed to go between the PC and Mac, but more likely, a problem with the KVM - probably that the KVM can’t handle whatever flavor of WUXGA video the Mac is putting out - some KVMs can’t handle the bandwidth of the widescreen signal, or they do some sort of buffering to compensate for the extra cable length, and the video signal is simply incompatible with what it can handle.
Well, yeah, if you’ve got a laptop hooked up to an external monitor, then you’re dealing with a desktop area that’s twice as big. That has nothing to do with the KVM.
Twice as big as what? Either way, why wouldn’t it show the entire Mac screen with black bars around it? Why would it show just a portion of the screen but with the entire, uncropped backdrop image?
Is there some setting on the Mac that would account for a different sized external monitor?
Sorry I wasn’t clear. When you hook up a Mac to more than one monitor, it will automatically create one single desktop spread across the two of them. To make that non-ugly, it displays a single background image on each monitor, and restricts the menu bar to one of them. When you’re in dual-monitor mode, go to the System Preferences and check out the Monitors (or is it called “Displays” now?) pane. That will show you a diagram of how your monitors are organized – you can move the external monitor to the left or right (depending on how your desk it laid out) and choose which one you want the menu bar and dock to appear on.
Ahhhhhhhh …
Thanks, friedo. I’ll play around with the displays setting.
What about the mouse? Is it maybe because the KVM puts the mouse and keyboard on one line?
This won’t sound very helpful, but FWIW I have struggled for days with 3 different recommended brands of KVM in a multiple PC setup, and never made it work, even with help from the corporate IT people who seem pretty good to me. I think they all have various tricks to do things like switch on a hotkey sequence, and the tricks don’t work right and torpedo everything else. I’ve decided that KVMs are a product that nobody knows how to make right, and I do my switching by plugging and unplugging cables and cursing at the manufacturers the whole time. This does work.
There’s also an option to mirror the Mac display on the external monitor. I’ve got a similar arrangement (PC and Macbook connected to a Belkin KVM switch with an LCD monitor and USB keyboard and mouse) and it works well. If I turn on the Macbook when the KVM switch isn’t set to it, sometimes I need to click Detect Displays on the menu bar thing. Once it’s working, though, I can shut the Macbook’s lid and switch back and forth between the PC and Mac.
Okay! Got it working now. I’ve used the Display box to mirror the monitor. The keyboard and monitor are now working.
I’ve given up on the mouse and I’m using a wireless mouse. So now I’ve got two mouses on my desk.
Now, the thing that is annoying me that the KVM apparently thinks that on a Mac keyboard, the “backspace” key is really a “delete” key. But that I can learn to live with, I guess.
Thanks for all your help.