IOGear MiniView SE 4-port
The first thing I noticed about the MiniView was the weight of the box—it's pretty heavy. Upon opening the box, I quickly discovered why: while the other switches in this roudup require you to buy your cables separately, the MiniView comes with four sets of cables right out of the box. Big bonus points to IOGear here, as it really just makes sense to bundle the essential cables with the KVM switch itself.

Of course, the weight isn't from the cables alone—the MiniView itself is a pretty beefy unit. Mounted on large rubber corners, the all-metal unit feels like a brick when compared to the lighter Linksys ProConnect. While I didn't try, for obvious reasons, I'm sure you could drop this off your desk several times and not have anything to worry about. With the large rubber corners, it might even bounce back up.

Following traditional KVM switch layout, the MiniView has its control keyboard and mouse ports in the front of the unit, with all other ports coming in at the rear. As we saw with D-Link's entry, this arrangement is much cleaner on a desk or work area, and allows control of the unit's buttons and view of its lights from one side. Taking a look at the front of the MiniView, you'll notice a few things lacking on the other switches.

First, the MiniView has two lights for each PC terminal instead of just one. An orange light is lit if there's a PC plugged into the corresponding port, with a second green light illuminating whenever that PC is selected. Alone, this is a pretty nice feature, but IOGear takes things one step further and turns each set of lights into a button controlling that PC. Instead of there being a single button that you use to cycle through the connected PCs, there are four buttons that you can use to select any PC instantly. Initially, I figured this more of a novelty feature, but I found myself using it more and more.

The MiniView also has the standard KVM tricks up its sleeve: hotkeys, a five-second autoscan feature, and trivial installation. IOGear mentions the MiniView's "Video Signal Enhancement" for supported resolutions up to 1920x1440, but side by side, I couldn't tell the video quality apart from the other units reviewed here. The other units lack explicit video signal enhancement features, but their quality was the same on both a 17" Trinitron and a 19" NEC AccuSync 95F.

Like D-Link's DKVM-4, the MiniView gives an audible cue each time you switch between connected computers. I'm not really sure if this is a necessary feature. It would be nice if the beeps could be disabled via a switch or hot-key combination, because the beeping gets a little annoying.

Not having heard much about IOGear before this review, I'm thoroughly impressed with their MiniView. With all the little extra features and included cables, they've clearly done their homework here.