Windows 7 User Submissions

Windows 7 RC versus Aten KVM Switch

by Les. Denning
(England, United Kingdom)

I have an Aten CS52D KVM DVI Hybrib switch that was purchased brand new as recently as October last year.

This switch has been functioning as expected, switching between a machine running Windows XP Pro and a machine Running Windows Vista Home Premium from October last until yesterday when I tried to use it inconjunction with Vista and Windows 7 instead of Vista and XP Pro.

I have been trialling the Windows 7 Release Candidates (RC), both the 32 bit and 64 bit versions with the prospect of moving the main User activity to Windows 7 proper when it becomes available later this year.

In order to try and make the transition from Vista to Windows 7 as least disruptive as possible the plan was to use the Aten KMV switch to allow the User to switch between the new machine running Windows 7 and the current machine running Vista.

Yesterday to my despair, having thought this part of the process was nearing completion ahead of the release of Windows 7 proper, I find this to be far from the case, because the Aten switch does not appear to be compatible with Windows 7, not the 32 bit version or the 64 bit one!

I have found that having booted up the Windows 7 machine with the focus of the Aten KVM switch on it all is well.

The Windows 7 machine works as you would expect it to but as soon as you press the KVM pushbutton to switch to the Vista machine, whether the Vista machine is running or not, the Windows 7 machine crashes, starts to reboot, enters the POST and goes to the Safe Mode recovery menu.

This has happened to me so many times now I am expecting the Windows 7 installation to fail to recover any time soon!

I have checked and rechecked all the connections and they are correct and this is confirmed because

I had been reviewing the BIOS settings on the Windows 7 machine and from there in its BIOS I can switch back and forth between the Vista machine's Desktop and the BIOS on the machine on which I have the two (32 & 64 bit) Windows 7 RC's installed on separate bootable partitions.

It is once the machine has booted up into Windows 7, either version, that the crash and reboot happens as soon as you press the pushbutton to leave the Windows 7 machine and switch to the other one.

The process of switching into Vista and subsequently out of Vista again works as it should and the machine running Vista is stable and continues to run without crashing as it has done for many months when switching to and from XP Pro.

I am hoping that someone will be able to explain to me what do to about this issue I have encountered with the Aten KVM Switch and Windows 7, as this discovery has put me back to square one on planning how to introduce the User transition from Vista to Windows 7 and a delay looks inevitable at the moment!