Kensington ShareCentral 5

Cool Yule Rating: 4 stars

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Cool Yule Rating: 4 stars

Price: $79.99

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Description: As many homes continue to add multiple computers to the mix, dealing with sharing a new printer, external hard drive, scanner or even just sharing a keyboard and mouse becomes a hassle with cables and networks, etc.

Kensington's ShareCentral 5 aims to ease the pain. The handy device connects to your first computer via USB, and then has a second port to connect to the second computer. Then, with five additional USB slots, you can connect things like a printer, external hard drive, scanner, digital camera, etc. A press of a button lets you know which computer has access to the peripheral – if you want to switch to the other computer, just press the button again and it goes to the other machine.

The device is relatively simple to set up and easy to get up and running (there is some software installation, but it wasn't painful). The only downside is that your two computers need to be relatively close to each other, as well as the peripherals that you want to attach. Still, it's a cool way to solve the problem of sharing devices between two PCs.

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