Hardware Bug ReportsATEN CS-1764UPDATE: ATEN sent us a new version of the CS-1764 (actually sent us a new version of the identical IOGEAR GCS-1764). The good news is the KVM worked well with all of machines except one. That machine appeared to have caused all of the original problems described below because it had a motherboard using the Nvidia nForce4 chipset which apparently was completely incompatible with the ATEN / IOGEAR DVI KVM firmware. The conflict with the chipset was so bad that it caused all of the problems described below on ALL machines on the KVM as soon as the nForce4 machine was turned on (even if that machine was not selected by the KVM). With the new version, none of the problems are evident. As we said, that's the good news. The bad news is that the KVM hardly worked at all with the nForce4 machine. In our tests, our USB mouse didn't work at all and our USB keyboard worked very sporadically. For now, we still can't recommend the ATEN CS-1764 / IOGEAR GCS-1764 KVM for anyone who as a machine with an nForce4-based motherboard. 12/15/05 ORIGINAL REPORT: As regular visitors to homePCnetwork.com know, it has been years since we've published a bona fide hardware bug report. But the time has come to break the streak having gotten our hands on a seemingly bug-riddled piece of equipment - the ATEN CS-1764 USB-DVI KVM (keyboard/video/mouse) switch. This KVM (you can read more about KVM switches in our how-to article) is simply full of problems. Here are just a few we've run into:
It is possible that we've simply gotten our hands on a bad unit (this is a full retail unit, by the way, that we purchased for our test labs; not a unit sent for review), but so far we've had no help from ATEN technical support and their website is not helpful in troubleshooting. If we get some resolution to the issue, we'll be sure to report back here. 09/05/05
Cyrix 166+ network problemWe've had a Cyrix 166+ CPU for sometime now and, for the most part, still think it was a good bargain at the time. Nonetheless, we ran into one problem a while back with a new motherboard and just recently discovered an absolute BUG with this CPU when it comes to some networking setups. The first problem occurred when we tried to boot this CPU after installing it in a Abit AX5 motherboard. The system simply would not boot AT ALL. We since have discovered a new BIOS for the motherboard that directly addresses this problem. You can pick up the BIOS at Abit's homepage if you have a similar setup. The second problem appears unsolved at this point. When installed in a QDI Explorer motherboard, the computer will NOT connect with any other computers on our home network. If we swap out the CPU and change NOTHING else, the network works fine. It's pretty clear who the culprit is in this setup. We installed the latest BIOS from QDI, but still no go. Since we know we had at least one other problem with the Cyrix 166+, we think it deserves to have the finger pointed at it and not the QDI motherboard. We'd like the solution to come from someone, however. 2/20/99
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