Hoping someone can tell me what I need to get this accomplished for my boss.
We have two monitors in a conference room and want to set them up to two different docking stations. Some of our reps have a dell laptop and some have a thinkpad. I want both docking stations to always be connected to the two monitors. For convenience I just want them to be ready for anyone to set down their laptop and get started. Also, I want both docking stations to be hooked up to one computer. It can't be done wirelessly though, company doesn't allow it. Would this be a KVM switch? The monitors have HDMI so that have one like that? Or do I get a 2 port dual dvi to USB? or will none of these work? I would like the simplest and cheapest way to make this work.
41 Answer
A KVM switch is not the answer here. You'd need two of them and they'd have to both be switched back and forth to go between them. Very confusing and just asking for support headaches.
You have two options here (assuming both docking stations have the same connector for their dual outputs).
- You can have a different input method for each docking station connected to different inputs on the screens (e.g. two DVI cables for one docking station, and two DisplayPorts for the other), and simply switch the screens to different inputs for different docking stations.
- Hook both docking stations backwards into two video splitter devices (one for each monitor, with each leg of the split going to the corresponding port on each docking station). I generally like to avoid VGA, but for this kind of setup VGA works best and is the cheapest. The drawback here is that you can never have both laptops docked at the same time.
