Blackcap Blog

Published at 10:19 on 17 June 2015

Don’t let the techno-cheerleaders for products like Synergy fool you. KVM switches still are very much relevant.

For openers, they let you switch a monitor as well as a keyboard and a mouse. That’s a big plus for me. One of my computers is a laptop with a limited amount of on-screen real estate. It’s a huge plus to be able to add my desktop’s screen to it.

Second, there’s the hidden catch of network-based keyboard and mouse sharing: lag. Even though slight, it’s quite noticeable, and very annoying. The keyboard lag in particular has an adverse impact on my typing speed.

So it looks like Synergy’s place is as a stopgap solution until the replacement for my now-dead KVM switch arrives.

Oh, and if you’re interested in downloading Synergy, it pays to go to the link above and not the one that shows up at the top of web searches. That latter site tries to zing you for the privilege of downloading a version that’s more recent than a year old (and such versions are clunky and difficult to configure, at least on a Mac). You’re much better off using the recommended version from the site I linked.