Daxten 1 Kensington 0

At work we have a number of laptops. To save a bit of desk space we tend to use Daxten SCOUTCombo KVM switches and a docking station. The problem with this setup is that the docking stations are proprietary and tend to be expensive. So I decided to look at universal docking stations and bought a Kensington Portable Universal Docking Station for evaluation as it seemed to best fit our requirements and would mean that it could be used with any laptop with a USB port. This would mean that in future we wouldn't need to buy a docking station every time we buy a laptop. It even supports an ethernet connection.

When it came, it looks nice and compact and can be easily tucked out of the way. I plugged it into my laptop and connected it all up. This is when the problems began. In fact the KVM switch stopped working. After a bit of experimenting I realised that it only stopped working when the PS2 mouse connector was in the docking station. This suggested that the issue was with the docking station rather than the switch. I had been successfully using that (and other) switches for about a year.

I emailed both Kensington and Daxten. A couple of days later I got rather terse email back from Kensington stating that none of their equipment supports KVM switches.I can find no reference to this on the packaging that came with the unit, nor can I find any such infomrmation on their website, neither can Google.

Fortunately for me, during those same few days I had been in frequent communication with Daxten. Not only were they prompt but they were extremely helpful. I discovered that I could connect the USB connection from the KVM switch to the laptop and then the KVM switch would work as expected. Now this isn't ideal as if I want to take the laptop I have to unplug lots of connections rather than one (and in my experience frequent connecting and disconnecting is often the cause of failure in laptops) but at least it works.

I've since discovered that I can plug the usb connection from the switch into the docking station (and not the mouse and keyboard connections) and it all works as expected. At least this means that I only need to disconnect the USB and monitor connections from the laptop.

Needless to say we won't be buying any more Kensington equipment but I will be advocating that of Daxten. One of the really nice things about this particular KVM switch is that it has four USB ports on the front which means I can plug my memory stick/camera etc in and they can be seen from all the computers.