There was a time when life was simple. You wanted to connect a monitor to a computer so you took the VGA cable and connected it between your computer and monitor, female to male and male to female. You couldn’t go wrong.
I just bought a new laptop. It doesn’t have a VGA connector. So my KVM switch won’t work with this laptop. I just realized that. A KVM switch is a set of cables plus a switch that allows you to connect a number of different computers to one keyboard, one video (monitor) and one mouse. That way you don’t kill all the real estate on your desk with multiple monitors, etc. Consumer KVM switches usually come with connectors for 2 or 4 computers. Until recently, I used my KVM switch to connect my work laptop, my personal laptop, and my personal desktop.
But now I have a new somewhat high-end HP Pavilion laptop that only has an HDMI connector. My work laptop has adapters for VGA and DisplayPort. Oh, and my desktop computer, which is about 7 years old, only has VGA connectors. One of my two 24-inch monitors has connections for VGA and DVI while the other monitor has connections for VGA, DisplayPort, and HDMI. And I’m having problems trying to figure out the differences between the various connector types and whether I can connect everything together via any type of KVM switch.
This blog entry is really meant for me so I can easily look up and remember which type of cable is which. So first, here are what the cable connectors look like:
Now that I have these pictures I hopefully will not forget which cable is which. What’s somewhat nice is that there is much compatibility between these digital cables. For example, there are DVI-HDMI cable adapters. There are also DisplayPort-HDMI cable adapters. And of course there are DisplayPort-DVI cable adapters such as this one which I own:
I need to integrate the computers and monitors so that they all use one type of adapter so that a KVM switch can be used to share the devices. Note that I will only be sharing one monitor between the computers. The second monitor will only be connected to my work computer.
The DVI interface is the oldest of the three digital interfaces so I’m choosing not to buy a DVI KVM switch. Where I’m living DisplayPort KVM switches aren’t available so I will buy a HDMI KVM switch. To get everything connected I will need to buy a couple of adapter cables: one DVI-to-HMDI cable (to connect my older monitor to the KVM switch) and one DisplayPort-to-HDMI cable (to connect my work computer to the KVM switch).
Now that was easy, wasn’t it?
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