More PC’s than keyboards
If you are anything like me you will have more PC’s than you have desk space for keyboards. In particular I have a main PC and a Tablet that I use all of the time. For many months now I have used ShareKMC to allow me to use one keyboard and mouse to control both, it toggles between the two using the scroll lock key. However I have been annoyed that it often seems to loose the connection when I undock and redock the Tablet and needs to be restarted.
So I was keen to try out an alternative Synergy (reviewed here), which seems to have a number of advantages:
- It works on Linux and Windows
- It doesn’t need a key to be pressed, you just move your mouse off the edge of your desktop screen and onto your tablets (as if by magic – the kids love it)
- It handles disconnection and re-connection fine
- It supports multiple monitors
- It reportedly (not tested by me) supports more than two PC’s sharing the keyboard and mouse
I have been VERY please with this utility, its faster, more intuitive and more reliable than ShareKMC and more flexible. I believe the only downside if that it only supports text “cut and paste”.
One little tip, it is disabled if scroll lock is pressed, if you have been using ShareKMC there is a good chance scroll lock could be pressed, and it took me a good half an hour to realise why it wasn’t working!
