KVM for Thinkpad Advice

[retailgeek]

I'm starting a new job and will be working at home for the first time, so I'm setting up my home office.

I have a desktop w/ two large monitors 26" and 23" that I primarily use at my desk. I also have a collection of Thinkpads that I use throughout my house, but I'm thinking of setting them all up with docks and a KVM in my home office, as their primarily location.

I seem to collect Thinkpads as I just sold a X200T, A31P, and T42P. I still have two older Thinkpads that I use infrequently: X42T dual-boots to Jolicloud or Windows 7, and a X61T (running windows 7). My primary personal laptop is a X201T and work just sent me a T510.

So the T-510 and the Dock for the X201T both have display ports. So one option is to get a two port display port KVM, and just use it for the two current laptops. (I potentially could still run the others and use remote desktop services if I did want to run some task on them). Am I better off getting a DVI and using adaptors from the display ports? Alternatively should I use a cheaper 4 port VGA KVM (all 4 docks support VGA)? I'll probably be buying a new 22" monitor as well.

Is there a brand or model of KVM that works well (with USB keyboard/mouse)?

Any thoughts are appreciated!

Jason

[crashnburn]

I'd like to know as well Recommendations?

[deforest]

I would just set up one machine to be a primary and have all your accessories, monitors keypad, mouse connected to that.

Then you can use rdp (or vnc) to connect to your other machines.

In my case I have a w700 with 3 monitors (dvi, display port, USB). Then I use remote desktop to connect to any of my other computers. When I connect to a win 7 based computer, I've found that I can configure rdp to use all 3 monitors. The older computers are running xp and they only allow 1 monitor for rdp. But that is fine cause i can open those computers using rdp and place them so they use one monitor and then I have 2 monitors free to work on other things.

Then with rdp I can share the clipboard, useful for copying/pasting keys, url's. Also the drives/cd's from the host computer are shared so I can copy/paste files/updates/patches back and forth.

Also if you vista or later os, you can configure so an only an app on the remote computer can be viewed locally, like running x windows where you can have apps running on different machines and showing up on a common display. But this is a bit of a pain to set up.

I used a KVM in the past but found this was superior for my work habits, plus it's free.