I’ve had this 4 port PS/2 KVM for quite a while now and while I never really noticed it until we had kids, the damn thing is quite loud.
I finally reached my breaking point with it today when I couldn’t change over to my Ubuntu machine for fear of waking my sleeping daughter up (yes putting my office next to her room was dumb). So once I was actually able to switch over and shut it down I disconnected it and set off with the goal of making it mute.
Now some models from Belkin have a firmware update that allows you to disable the beep, but of course mine is so old there’s just no way. So I did a little exploratory surgery and discovered they hid the single screw that holds this thing togther under the black and silver “Belkin” badge on the top of it. Once I had that undone the thing pretty much fell apart in my hands.
I had to unplug a single wire harness on the left front side of the circuit board, and the select button wiggled away from me and fell out of the chassis. But never mind all that…my prey now lay naked and helpless before the might of my #2 phillips screwdriver and screamin’ hot soldering iron.
I simply unscrewed two black screws, and then heated up a solder joint enough to pop it out and give it a good twist away to the side. You could have just cut it off, smashed it, covered it with tape, whatever deviant method the voices tell you in your head. It doesn’t matter.
Pure utter bliss now awaits me the next time I need to boot to Vista or Ubuntu. Well….at least in the sense of the KVM that is.
3 Responses to “Telling your Belkin Omniview F1DB104P to shut up”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
Thanks Dennis!
I was on the point of using a drill or even a soldering iron to get through the presumed sealed plastic rivet under the label at the bottom. I had considered for a moment removing the logo, but because Belkin once offered a no-beep firmware upgrade for this box (and apparently no longer do so according to Support today), I thought they probably wouldn’t hide it there, as they wouldn’t want the logo removed. I was wrong!
I will take the box home tonight and get it open, and apply your fix. (My company seems no longer to have a soldering iron – due to downsizing??) The reason for all this, was not a baby daughter in this case, it was the normally fairly mild-mannered guy next to me at work, who I knew didn’t like the beep, but when asked by our boss today how he was doing, he came out with a sentence, every other word of which could have been beeped – perhaps by a Belkin switch box!
Thanks again,
Trevor
By the way, are you any realation to F C Judd, renowned electronics guy in the UK who was invloved in Sapce Patrol as well as writing a lot of good stuff useful to hobbyists?
heh, nope just a normal guy who dislikes beeping things.
P.S. Space Patrol (the correct spelling), in which FC Judd was involved, was a puppet series which rivalled Gerry Anderson’s Fireball XL5 (GA did Supercar/Stingray/Thunderbirds too). I think FCJ did the really good audio effects for the gyroscope-shaped spacecraft landing etc.