Click to See Complete Forum and Search --> : My $20 KVM for old Mac to PS/2


Labman
03-02-2008, 04:31 PM
I checked around the only one I found was $184. I bought a cheap little KVM for $16. The Mac has been running for years with an adapter to a PS/2 monitor. Just plugging everything in took care of the monitor. Mice don't take that much room, so I do have 2 cluttering up the desk. That left the keyboards. I made a couple of wooden end caps and clamped the 2 keyboards together, bottom to bottom. It only takes seconds to hit the KVM button, flip the keyboards over, and grab the other mouse.

OK, we are still hanging on an ancient Power Mac. Hey, I can do simple text and graphic tasks on it in less time than it takes to open Open Office on my Linux box. However, web surfing takes for ever. We recently came by an old Windows 98 box. As much as I despise them, and usually skip them, there are some web sites that nothing except Windows and IE seems to work. I got tired of IE crashing, and installed Foxfire too. IE is still there when worst comes to worst. So in little more space than one, for next to nothing, we have 2 computers, each filling a special need.

saikee
03-02-2008, 06:03 PM
So if you load VMware or virtual PC you have it the both world of real and virtual machines.

Labman
03-08-2008, 09:53 PM
How long does it take the virtual machine to boot? I can do the change over in seconds.

saikee
03-09-2008, 05:58 AM
The virtual machines are inside a host operating system so it is just another window in the desktop. One can save a virtual machine, which is just a huge file of about 8Gb, without ever exiting it at all. There are a lot of functions that a virtual machine cannot do. One of them is booting because only the host system does the actual booting.

The best way I could describe virtual machines is they are same as prisoners held in solidary confinement. Each virtual machine can communicate with the host, just like the prisoner communicating with the prison guard. There is no communication between the virtual machines themselves. What the virtual machine can do is entire dependent what the host operating system can allow.

To understand and operate a system fully there is no substitute better than the phyiscal system itself and using a KVM switch is the only way to run several PC concurrently.