Rule 404: For any subject, there is a website that is supposed to contain porn about it, but which is not working.

I've got two desktop computers running at home: an old Windows XP box which I use primarily for recreation, and a new Windows 8 machine which I use mostly for work.  I very much dislike many of the new "features" of the Win8 user interface.  What genius thought that replacing the start menu with a "start screen", and not even allowing me to have the start menu as an unrecommended option, was a good thing?  Supposedly it was done in anticipation of touch-screen computers becoming common, but surely it is obvious that many computer users wouldn't go that route.  I should have done more research before buying.

Each machine has its own keyboard, mouse, and monitor, which makes my desk a tangled mess (even more than it would otherwise be).  I tried one KVM switch (keyboard, video, mouse) from the local Future Shop, to let the two machines share one mouse and keyboard, and also share one monitor.  But I had to return it because the video coming through was intolerably blurry.  Most of the KVM switches that are available would have to be ordered in, and if I'm going to do that, I want to get one that comes recommended by someone I know/trust.  The on-line reviews aren't very helpful, since every item I've seen has both good ("Works fine!") and terrible ("Piece of junk!  And their customer service sucks!  And the toggle is inconvenient / takes 15 seconds to switch, when it works at all / frequently triggers for no good reason!") reviews.

Can any of you give me some recommendations from your own experience about which 2-port USB KVM switches to try, or to avoid?

Thanks!
 

Something on the internet is broken
but I can fix it
I have the skills
or at least I would if I weren't so tired
from staying up late
trying to fix things on the internet
that are broken
 

This morning's dream involved me being repeatedly annoyed by the sounds from the big-screen video game in my bedroom until I finally tried to continue playing the game, by which time the game position was, essentially, too late to do anything but try to salvage the situation.  My inability to remember how to play, and to figure out the instruction booklet — <sarcasm>there's a novel situation in a dream</sarcasm> — just made things worse.

Some kind of extremely-large bright-yellow monster was attacking one of my space bases.  The monster lived in a higher dimension or parallel dimension, so all I could see were the free ends of its many tentacles, like a swarm of elongated blobs moving around within the shell of the space platform.  As each of those blobs was destroyed, the next section of the tentacle would be pulled into our dimension: larger and slower, but taking more damage to destroy.  When enough of the tentacles were gone, the body of the creature would be dragged into our space... with the active bomb it was carrying.  The bomb couldn't be hit without detonating it, destroying the station.

The creature's plan had been to travel through hyperspace to the station, with only the tips of its tentacles "showing" in normal space.  When it was coincident with the station, it would arm the bomb, deposit it inside the station, and then depart through hyperspace.  If I had engaged the creature during its approach, I might have been able to retrieve the inactive bomb and add it to my own arsenal.  By ignoring the game as long as I had, I'd ensured the loss of the station.

I don't play blow-things-up video games; my reflexes and coordination are terrible for that kind of thing, and I only like blowing things up for fun, not for violent purposes.  But this was an interesting game concept.
 

About a month and a half ago, I noticed that my Windows XP box seemed to be slowing down.  The most noticeable problem was an increasing delay when I right-clicked on a file in Windows Explorer, before the list of possible actions appeared.  Initially the delay was just a few seconds, but over time it increased to a couple of minutes.

( (Details of the solution are left as an exercise for the interested student...) )
Apparently the Seagate Replica software takes a long time to search for all the older versions of a file to build its sub-menu in the file action list, and while it's working on that, Windows Explorer hangs.

The problem, of course, is that I didn't want to leave the external drive disconnected while I was using the computer.  That would take away most of the value of having it in the first place: a system for backing up my files which didn't require my attention, and wasn't vulnerable to my fallible memory.

After a bit of guesswork about possible solutions, I found a software tool that allows me to control which options appear in the file-action list: FileMenu Tools, by Rubén López Hernández.  I haven't played with it extensively, but it appears to do just what it says — a simple user interface to allow filesystem actions to be enabled/disabled — and does it pretty well.  Under "Commands of other applications", under "All file system objects", I unchecked "CRebitContextMenuExt" (and it took me a fair bit of trial-and-error searching to determine that that was the Replica action).  Voilà, my file operations are back up to their proper speed.  If I do need to retrieve a file sometime in the future, I can re-enable that action.

It's a work-around, not a solution.  I'm disappointed that the problem has been reported to Seagate repeatedly over quite some time, but nothing seems to have been done about it.