Belkin Omniview E Series 4-Port KVM Switch, PS/2 User Reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: Superficially OK but too irritating to live with.
Comment: I recently bought one of these 4-port Belkin KVMs as I had expanded my home office to three PCs with a fourth on the way. I thought this would be a good way to avoid all those extra keyboards, mice and monitors. I had been using a 2-port KVM of a different make which switched instantly and reliably between PCs with a double press of Scroll-Lock.
The Belkin is a chunky box which sits on your desktop, within reach. It has front connections for keyboard and mouse, and rear connections for the monitor and 3 connections (keyboard, monitor, mouse) for each of 4 PCs. It's a PS/2-only device with no USB connectivity (although my USB mouse seems to work well enough through a USB-to-PS/2 adapter).
Installation of the Belkin was simplicity itself. Just plug in all the cables to the clear, colour-coded sockets and away you go. No power supply is necessary for a single KVM. Switching between PCs is achieved by pressing the button on the KVM to cycle to the next PC or by hitting Scroll-Lock twice follwed by a digit (1 to 4)for which PC you want to use.
At first it seemed to work OK but over the next few hours and days, some annoying features emerged:
1. The beep! It can't be turned off and it sounds an unpleasant high-pitched blip every time you press the KVM's button and twice if you use the hotkey sequence. In a home office it's intrusive but in a shared office it would quickly annoy the heck out of your co-workers.
2. The mouse pointer freezes for 2 to 3 seconds after switching, before you can move it again. Not a great length of time but it reduces my productivity and increases my frustration. My previous KVM didn't have to do this, so why does the Belkin? Its manual bleats about having to re-acquire mouse co-ordination or something equally vague and unsatisfying.
3. It often ignores the hotkey sequence on the first attempt. Maybe this is why Belkin added that bleedin' beep to tell you that it had (not) seen Scroll-Lock twice. But by the time you realise that you didn't hear the beep, your fingers have moved on and pressed a digit key, which probably then ends up typed into whatever document you have open. Several of my documents have ended up with an errant "1" or "2" hidden away in them ...
4. Sometimes after switching, it changes the state of the F-Lock and Caps-Lock. Given that F-Lock is necessary for the hotkey sequence to work, turning it off sneakily seems rather underhand! On my keyboard at least (which is, however, a standard and genuine Microsoft keyboard) the Caps-Lock light is often lit up after a switch. Capital letters themselves aren't on and it takes 2 presses of Caps-Lock to turn the light off. Why?
5. Sometimes after switching, a PC "loses" the mouse or keyboard. You can recover keyboard loss by unplugging and re-plugging the keyboard, but since there is no mouse recovery feature as on other KVMs, mouse loss can only be recovered by rebooting the affected PC. This is perhaps the most aggravating thing of all as it can be a real productivity-killer and always seems to happen at the worst possible moment.
6. After switching, the KVM seems to issue a mouse-button event to the attached PC. This is sometimes a "back" click on my 5-button mouse and sometimes a roll of the mouse wheel. Again, this may be only my mouse, but it's another standard, genuine and ubiquitous Microsoft Intellimouse product. In practice, it can change the page you are viewing to the previous one or effect a scroll if that's what your mouse's wheel does. This is the second time I have typed this whole review as I switched to another PC after typing the first draft, and the KVM did a back-button click as I returned here, going to the previous page and destroying my words! Grrrrrr!
7. When pressing the button on the KVM to cycle through the PCs, it will happily switch to unused ports. Many KVMs ignore unused ports to avoid having to cycle through them to get back to a working one. The Belkin insists on visiting all 4 ports in turn and even introduces a 2 second delay before you can move on to one that works.
These faults add up to a device which should be simple and transparent to live with, but which is most definitely not. I have now ordered a different make of KVM after carefully studying its online manual.
Anyone want to buy a little-used Belkin before it goes in the bin? ;-)
Customer Rating:
Summary: Works Well
Comment: We bought this to save space, and it works!We now have one monitor, keyboard and mouse where once we had four. We just press a button to work on the PC we want.
Customer Rating:
Summary: PC Control made easy!!!
Comment: I purchased this item to make my life easier and I made the right decision. The product from Belkin is excellent, high quality and very easy to use and setup. The idea is that instead of needing up to four keyboards, four mice and four monitors to control your computers you can do it all through the one set. The Belkin product comes with all the necessary cables to control the four computers, many other equivalent models require you to buy them separately and these can cost up to £20.00 per set so its is excellent value for money. The short but detailed instruction set shows you how to jump from computer to computer, set it up to scan through them all, or default to a particular one. All in all I am very impressed by this product and am happy to recommend it to anyone needing to use more than one computer, wanting to save desk space, and keep wires to a minimum.
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