On Tue, Jul 20, 2004 at 09:19:29PM -0400, Gregory Avedissian wrote:
Can anyone tell me if there's an advantage to plugging the mouse or the keyboard into usb rather than ps2?
USB was designed to be hot-swappable. PS/2 was not. If you are lucky, your modern systems and peripherals may work after hotswapping PS/2. Otherwise, you may have problems with certain combinations of hardware and software. Linux/XFree86/Xorg-X11 is especially bad at handling PS/2 swapping. If you are unlucky (mainly older hardware) you will fry your PS/2 controller if you attempt to hot-swap. Some "keyboard wedge" barcode scanning wands are notorious for this. Most KVM switches will emulate an active interface to every computer's PS/2 ports that appears always connected to a keyboard/mouse, so the computer won't see them go away when the KVM is controlling a different PC. However, as there are several protocols a PS/2 mouse can speak, often a KVM will interfere by emulating the wrong thing. Sometimes one computer will reprogram the mouse and that will mess up its use on another computer after switching. I encounter this often. Usually Ctrl-Alt-F1 followed by Ctrl-Alt-F7 works to bring the mouse back to sanity in X11 after such a KVM input change, but not before the mouse has had a chance to randomly paste junk and click randomly all over my open applications. Finally, some laptops and computers with laptop-style 3.3 volt PS/2 controller chips in them (e.g. most recent Dells) won't work with PS/2 extender cables or some KVM switches (e.g. Belkin). On mine I had to purchase a PS/2-keyboard/mouse-to-USB adapter to plug into my Dell USB port to allow the KVM switch to work. PS/2 needs to die.