Today I ran across an issue. The application I’m developing (in WPF) wouldn’t run via Remote Desktop, at least not via the Windows 7 Home Premium hacked version I’m using. Since I was using Remote Desktop to my laptop to save me fiddling with monitor inputs and keyboard/mouse cabling this left me with a troublesome issue. However I knew I’d previously heard of an application that let you control multiple PCs with one mouse and keyboard so I fired up Google.
I came across QSynergy and Synergy2 but when I tried using them I ran in to issues with Windows 7 UAC. More time with Google found synergy+ but it suffered the same issue. Thankfully since I didn’t need cross platform support I eventually found, and ended up using, InputDirector. So that got my keyboard and mouse working over on the notebook without an issue, but I wanted my display on the main monitor (Dell U2410) which thankfully has plenty of inputs. So I connected the notebook to the monitor via the DisplayPort input. Now I just needed to use the monitor soft keys to switch inputs back and forth. But the stupid setup by Dell means that’s about 4 soft key presses each way. There had to be a better way…
More Google work eventually led me to the solution. I could create desktop shortcuts to a little shareware application called mControl (not the home automation software, but a little monitor control utility from the makers of PowerStrip). Combined with the macros in InputDirector I can now switch back and forth between inputs with 1 copy of mControl (on the “master” PC). Now time to dive back in to that coding. :)
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