How to connect my monitors and keyboard and mouse to 2 computers?

Cromulent · 28 Nov 2016 at 08:11

I'm thinking about buying a second computer. I also want to keep my current computer. My new computer will run Windows 10 and will be my gaming / video editing / streaming machine and my old computer will be my working machine where I mainly do programming and stuff.

The only problem is I only have room for one desk. So I was wondering if it would be possible to use the same monitors and mouse and keyboard for both computers without having to unplug things from one and plug them into another all the time?

Basically the hardware I have is the following

2 DisplayPort Monitors
1x USB Keyboard
1x USB Mouse

and I want to share them between two computers.

I've done a little research and apparently you can get a KVM device to share things like this but most of them only support one monitor and they are normally not DisplayPort either. So I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions at all?

TWiNKLeT0Es · 28 Nov 2016 at 10:27

From Microsoft: Mouse without Borders.

Cromulent · 28 Nov 2016 at 10:41

TWiNKLeT0Es said:
From Microsoft: Mouse without Borders.

Thanks for the info.

Edit: Unfortunately one machine will be running Linux and the other will be running Windows 10 so I doubt that software will work on a Linux machine. Plus it doesn't help with sharing monitors between two machine.

I think I'm going to need a hardware device for this.

Rroff · 28 Nov 2016 at 10:54

For keyboard and mouse switching then the Aten US224 - simplest way to do it and works a lot better than the other cheapy USB KVMs, no issues with latency, compatible with a wide range of devices, slight 1-2 second pause on switching but you need the much more expensive KVMs with hardware emulation to prevent that.

If you want to share monitors as well especially displayport and/or multiple ones you will need much more expensive KVMs i.e. talking stuff like the Aten CS1942 (~£300 and upwards) which I've no experience of personally. (EDIT: If you had a need for displayport 1.4 or higher that would cause some complications as well - as far as I can see more of these devices are 1.0 or 1.1a).

Cromulent · 29 Nov 2016 at 07:05

Rroff said:
For keyboard and mouse switching then the Aten US224 - simplest way to do it and works a lot better than the other cheapy USB KVMs, no issues with latency, compatible with a wide range of devices, slight 1-2 second pause on switching but you need the much more expensive KVMs with hardware emulation to prevent that.

If you want to share monitors as well especially displayport and/or multiple ones you will need much more expensive KVMs i.e. talking stuff like the Aten CS1942 (~£300 and upwards) which I've no experience of personally. (EDIT: If you had a need for displayport 1.4 or higher that would cause some complications as well - as far as I can see more of these devices are 1.0 or 1.1a).

Thank you for the reply.

Ah, that's a shame that they are all so expensive for the monitor ones. £300 is a lot of money to spend on a KVM.

I might just put my plans on hold when it comes to buying a second computer and just keep my current one and do a few more upgrades to make it last for another couple of years.

I could also run Linux in dual boot which would be useful for my programming work or I could just use virtual machines which was my original plan.