[gthyb]

Hey guys. I'm building the cheapest possible PC to play counterstrike. its going to be next to my mac, and i was wondering if it is possible to share a USB keyboard and mouse. what keyboard would work for both systems? what sort of switch would be availible?

-Ryan

[kardinal.cmg]

AFAIK, you can plug in an apple USB keyboard into a PC, and it should work with a generic keyboard driver. Granted, the power and eject keys won't work, but that's not a big loss.

[ginoledesma]

I'm not sure how Macs react to generic KVM (Keyboard, Video, Mouse) switches, but Belkin has always made quality Mac-compatible, not to mention reliable, products. You'd need one that has USB ports at the very least to drive a mouse and keyboard for the Mac. Most PCs come with USB ports already, and I'm sure MS Windows has the drivers for these built-in already.

Do you intend to control both machines simultaneously or one at a time?

[CyberDave]

Originally posted by ginoledesma:
I'm not sure how Macs react to generic KVM (Keyboard, Video, Mouse) switches, but Belkin has always made quality Mac-compatible, not to mention reliable, products. You'd need one that has USB ports at the very least to drive a mouse and keyboard for the Mac. Most PCs come with USB ports already, and I'm sure MS Windows has the drivers for these built-in already.

Do you intend to control both machines simultaneously or one at a time?

I got myself a generic USB-based KVM switch a few months ago to share my keyboard, monitor, and mouse with my PC (it's so generic I can't even remember the brand at the moment..it might be Hawking). It works pretty nicely. The four USB ports on it also let me share my USB-connected Lexmark Z32. As far as I can tell, this one actually switches everything from one machine to the other; I believe IOGear's models fool the host machines into thinking the USB devices are still attached or something like that. In any case, there's a bit of a lag with mine when I switch from one machine to the other as the OS detects that the USB devices have been reattached and loads the drivers (the Mac with Jaguar seems faster than this than the XP box ).

One issue I've had with this KVM: under 10.1.x, the machine would occasionally stop recognizing the hub in the KVM upon waking from sleep. I would have to plug the keyboard/mouse directly into the computer to be able to restart it cleanly. Upon restart, the hub works fine again. Under Jaguar, instead of simply not recognizing the hub, the machine occasionally kernel panics when waking from sleep (interestingly, the panic message appears on my secondary monitor, not the primary one in my dual-monitor setup). The panic log always mentions something about the USB Hub driver module. This has happened to me less with 10.2.1 than with 10.2. And it hasn't happened for a few weeks (knock on wood).

That's my experience. Right now, my PC is used for gaming and TV viewing (since my dorm room is currently sans television). All my serious work gets done on my Mac.

Edit: I use a Microsoft Internet Keyboard Pro and a Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer with the KVM and the computers.

Edit 2: Found the KVM I use: Hawking Technology CS-102U

CyberDave

[gthyb]

thanks guys. i'll take a look.