Hopefully no-one has tried to pair the IOGear USB KVM and a USB to Dual PS/2 Keyboard Mouse Adapter that I mentioned in my Blog Entry “Wrong Connectors“, because it won’t work!

Right after opening the USB adapter, I realized that there was no way it was going to connect to the KVM. There was a really wrong connector. What I needed were two male PS2 adapters to a female USB adapter. Instead, the cable was the exact opposite. If I’d looked at the picture carefully I would have realized it. Reading the package label made it even clearer “Use your PS/2 compatible mouse and keyboard in a USB port“. That wasn’t what I wanted to do. Instead, I wanted to connect a USB KVM with USB connectors to a computer which had PS/2 compatible ports. An adapter like this just doesn’t seem to exist. I tried connecting up the the older PC to the USB KVM with a USB to PS2 adapter connected to the keyboard. This way the PS/2 mouse was connected directly to the PC, as the USB KVM only has a VGA and one USB male connector for each PC. This didn’t work. After a number of permutations I settled on one with the new PC connected to the KVM, and the older one just having the monitor connected to the KVM. This means I still have a mouse and a keyboard for each computer, but I freed up the two VGA cables I was using.

There are KVM boxes available which support PCs with both PS/2 and USB keyboard and mouse adapters, like the Belkin Omniview Soho 4 port KVM Switch, but I’ll continue to try to get my IOGear USB KVM to work.