Home > Consumer Reviews > IOGEAR GCS1712 MiniView III USB KVMP Switch Kit with Cables (2-Port)

After a bad experience with a Belkin SOHO KVM, I ended up getting an IOGear MiniView III 2-Port KVMP. After 3 or 4 hours of use I'm 95% satisfied. The display is as clear as I expect it to be (which is to say, perfectly). There's no delay when typing or moving the mouse, even when typing fast. Occasionally, I will get a stuck key for a fraction of a second, but it's very rare. USB sharing seemed to work perfectly. I was also pleasantly surprised to see that F12 worked as [Eject] on the Mac side. There's also less than a second of delay when switching between machines.

The only real problem I have is that I switched the KVM's on screen display activation key to [scroll lock] [scroll lock] from [ctrl] [ctrl], but Apple keyboards apparently don't handle F14 exactly the same as Scroll Lock, so now I can't access the On Screen Display. Pisser, but not a huge deal since I can still switch machines with the [ctrl] [shift] [option] [#] command. A minor complaint is that I can't disable the beep that happens when machines are switched.

Definitely a nice KVM.

I have a MS Office Keyboard (not wireless), and a MS Wireless Intellimouse Explorer. Neither the keyboard nor the mouse worked acceptably with the KVMP switch.

The keyboard has several special keys for copy/paste, along with several buttons for launching applications. None of these worked. Neither of my systems (1 Win2K Pro, 1 WinXP Pro) would recognize the keyboard as anything other than a generic keyboard. Both systems work perfectly with the keyboard with a direct connection.

The mouse suffered from a similar fate, except that every time you started moving the mouse from a rest, the mouse right-click behavior would execute. Plus, right clicks would also randomly occur.

Email to IOGEAR support wasn't much help. Their response was: 'At this time, wireless keyboards and mice are not supported for our products.' This, of course, failed to address the issue with my wired keyboard. I would replace my mouse with a wired one if I could get the keyboard working. Too bad.

This product probably works OK for generic, wired, input devices.

Bottom line: This dog don't fetch.

On the very positive side, the switch was really simple to set up. However, it doesn't work correctly with Win XP Tablet edition (mouse will go crazy and, if you have a monitor on the tablet that can switch from portrait to lanscape, it will always startup sideways regardless of your settings). Also, doesn't support the Apple key on a Mac -- but does work fine with Mac otherwise. Can be annoying for power keyboard users because the hot keys for switching are automatically on and anytime you press Ctrl twice it prompts you to switch (but, other than that, it's really great on Win XP Professional or Win 2000 machines). I'm still using the switch, though, for lack of better options ... it's better than being without one. And better than the competitors I've seen.

I use this model at home, and we also use a large number of these KVM's at work (large defense contract company). At work we use both the 2 port and 4 port models. We were aware of the issues ahead of time that can be caused by wireless keyboard/mouse, so we were prepared. Using serveral different models of wired USB keyboard/mice, including Microsoft, Dell, IBM/Lenovo, HP/Compaq, we have not had any major issues. We have not seen any issues using the IoGear KVM's with either CRT or flat screen monitors. Most at work have been in service without any major issues for a couple of years - - and heavy switching use daily. Only issue I've noticed on rare occasion, is that once in a while when using the hotkey and F4 to switch to another computer, it sometimes will not actually make the switch after hitting enter. Again, this is pretty infrequent.

Front of the unit has LED's that give a visual status on the switch: One set of LED's show if the computer on that port is connected/running, and one set shows which port you're currently connected to.

You can use the buttons on the front of the device to manually select the computer, or you can use a hotkey (which can be modified to your preference) which will show an on-screen menu. You can also name your connections in the settings of the on-screen menu, so you'll know which computer connection is which. With the on-screen menu, you can see what computer the KVM is connected to, as well as which computer the spare USB port is connected to. Via the onscreen menu, you can change either the KVM connection, the USB connection, or both. The onscreen menu is a little "bulky" and large, and if this was a little more less shocking each time you open it up, being a little smaller I would have added the 5th star.

Being able to switch the spare USB port comes in handy, and a nice feature.... I have two computers running on two different networks at work, and because of required firewalls, there is no chance of connectivity between the two computers. With a USB flash drive in the spare USB port, I can take files from one computer, stage them on the USB flash drive, use the hotkey/menu to switch both the keyboard/mouse AND the USB port using the KVM over to the other computer, then use the staged file on the second computer.

I don't use wireless mouse nor keyboard at home, so no complain there. It works perfectly fine with the USB keyboard and USB mouse. I have the switch connected to my laptop and my desktop machine and I switch between the two machines using Ctrl + Ctrl hot key. It's really nice being able to see where I was and where I'm going. And it shows which machine the shared USB is connected to.

As another person indicated in the reivew of this product, it doesn't have a feature to turn off the beep when switching the machines. It gets kinda annoying at times, but it really isn't a big deal.

I have experienced no mouse skipping after switching, which I used to come across a lot with PS2 type of switches before. It's a really good switch if you have two machines you would like to use and all your peripherals are USB.