Just moved my home office to a slightly bigger room recently. Now, I can maneuver my main work desk more freely into center as an island. No more wall to hide some ugly pc related stuffs around my beautiful desk! Hiding this mess is no easy task at all, needing some $$ to buy cable conduits, etc. But real annoyance is that fact that the pc hulk has to be as near to the desk as possible: video monitor plus mouse & keyboard, that’s problem!
Solution by chance was in using a product called usb & vga extender. For usb extender, I already had it being used for printer connection. It just worked even though sometimes presented some mysterious hiccups. It would take care of extending keyboard & mouse. Real task is to extend ‘fragile’ analog vga signals beyond 10’. Well, the proliferation of big screen lcd type monitors, extending it already in mature stage with very very reasonable cost.
One I googled today was vgatovideo.com’s very reasonable product called ‘VGA to Video Extension Kit’. It looks like a perfect product for my situation. Only at $33 for 10’ CAT6 version, that’s a perfect fit. Now, question is this: how ‘good’ is this type of product? I would guess it contains some active components like balun(i.e., impedance matcher). Has anyone has some experience with this kind of product?
Follow-up on this blog:
This product turns out too good to be true. After thoroughly having tested this product, I concluded this is not working as advertised at least for my application. I needed to place 1280×1080 resolution LCD monitor at least 12’ from pc box. It initially worked fine at least an hour.. then display turns unstable like flickering. They specified this particular product as resolution up to 1280×1080 at over 12’ distance. I gave up on this so called vga-to-CATx product solution, gone back to ‘classic’ vga coaxial cable which many time supports up to 16’. Too bad, too bad.. I will have to return this ‘bad’ product soon.