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tanquiano

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 4, 2013
3
0
My dual-core power pc is great for music work with logic, but can't play flash player, and plays video very slowly. I'd like to have a small but powerful modern computer, maybe mac mini or anything that will allow me to share my screen and mac keyboard and mouse, with either a KVM switch or suitable software. Is this possible? Has anyone done it?
 

CapnCrunch53

macrumors member
Sep 9, 2012
59
11
Indiana
I use Synergy to share my main Windows 7 machine's keyboard and mouse with my PowerMac MDD running 10.5 Leopard. It works pretty much perfectly; even copy/paste sharing is functional. I did have to hunt and search for a version that would work properly; I'm using one of the old terminal-only versions of Synergy on the Mac, and the newest version on the PC, and they play together perfectly. Newer versions on the Mac were giving me mouse issues if I recall correctly.

That of course doesn't solve video; if you have an extra input on your monitor, that would work. In my case, I have the Mac going to the spare VGA input on my monitor.

If you want to go the KVM route, I have experience with two different products. First, I have a number of these cheap Rosewill switches for some of my older machines. They've never given me problems and are nice and reliable, and support pretty high resolutions apparently. They only do VGA, though.

For my 2 secondary PCs where I wanted DVI quality, I bought this Iogear switch. Again, it's served me great, hasn't given me any problems. I'd recommend either of these KVM switches. Something to keep in mind with a KVM switch is that it will need at least 1 USB cable connected for power. Probably not a big deal but thought I'd mention it; when I've used them with some old (Pentium 3-era) PCs it was a bit of a pain since they usually only had 2 ports.
 
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