Recently we posted about "Mouse Without Borders" utility released by Microsoft Garage:
Microsoft Releases Free “Mouse without Borders” Utility
The above utility allows you to control up to 4 PCs with single mouse and keyboard. You can move your mouse cursor from one screen to another.
AskVG readers "Kowalski" and "Nunja Business" shared 2 excellent free tools "Synergy" and "Input Director" which do the same job.
Synergy:
Synergy is a free and open source software that lets you easily share your mouse and keyboard between multiple computer systems, where each computer has its own display. No special hardware is required, you just need a network connection. Synergy can be used in Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Usage is as simple as moving the mouse off the edge of your screen. You can even share your clipboard.
You can download it using following link:
Input Director:
Input Director is another similar free utility for Windows users only that lets you control multiple Windows systems using your keyboard/mouse attached to one computer system. It is designed for people who have two (or more) computers next to each other and find themselves regularly switching from one system to the other.
With Input Director, you can share a single keyboard/mouse across a set of systems. You switch which system receives the input either by hotkey or by moving the cursor so that it transitions from one screen to the other (in a very similar fashion to a multi-monitor setup). The idea being that you can position the monitors from two or more systems in a row and use a shared keyboard/mouse to control all of them.
Input Director also supports a "shared" clipboard, in which you can copy data onto the clipboard on one system, transition across to another and paste.
Input Director requires Windows 2000 SP4, XP SP2, Server 2003, Vista, Server 2008 or Windows 7.
You can download it using following link:
This article was posted by VG in following section: Software.
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to our RSS feed or free newsletter to get all new articles directly in your Inbox. Also check out our popular articles and archive to read other interesting articles.
seahorsepip
This stuff is still worse then the program from garage since this has still a client and a host technique, so only host mouse/keyboard can be used but at the garage app we can use both mouse and keyboard and it works peer to peer!
Saurabh
Nice share. thnx
mona
hi VG
Thanks for info,also if you like share this (Mouse Emulator)freeware
Is your mouse broken, or did you just forget it? Or maybe you are having USB driver problems, and your mouse isn't working. With Mouse Emulator, you can still use your computer.
Yust run the program, and it will show you which keys you have to press to move the mouse cursor. For more information, check the readme or read the manual on this page.
This program is also very usefull for laptop owners with low quality mouses. Just hold down the Fn key, and you can use the numeric keypad in the center of your keyboard to move the mouse!
Mouse Emulator can also toggle mouse buttons with a simple key press. This is very useful for RSI users that have problems with drag operations with the mouse.
rhdesigns.browseto.org/mouseemulator.html
Amiel
what about multplicity from Stardock?
Patrick
hmmm, this will give gamers the idea to control multiple accounts for their online games... (ehem)
Joshua
As I am on Windows systems I use Input Director and have done so for the last year or so. previously used Synergy for a number of years. I swapped to Input Director over Synergy as it lets you copies files from one machine to another (with copy/paste) and not just text.
I will give Microsoft's new version a try though. It never hurts to see which one works best.