I have two work machines—a workstation and a work notebook. I need to be working on both during most times of the day.¹

In the last seven months in my new job, I’ve been either using my office chair to move between these two machines or been using Ultra VNC. While rolling across the desk using my chair was fun, I hated the juggle—it begins to get to you after a while. Connecting to the other machine by VNC is fine except for the screen refresh inertia. Using VNC also shielded the view of my other machine’s desktop—not really a cool way to do it.

Thanks to Matt Cutts’s post about Synergy today, I am able to solve my problem of using two separate machines with one keyboard and one mouse. And it does more—like sharing the clipboard between machines! Amazing².

Unlike Matt’s, my setup is much simpler, because both my machines run Windows. Here’s how I did it:

I installed Synergy on the notebook first, and set it as Server via the option: “Share this computer’s keyboard and mouse (server)”.

Under “Screens and Links: Configure”, I added both machine names (server and client) under “Screens” — you can also choose to add machine IP addresses instead³.

My machines monitors are placed like this:

[Workstation monitor--machine 1][Laptop outboard monitor--machine 2]

To define moving between screens (Left to right monitor), I defined the right edge of Workstation monitor to move (control) to the Laptop outboard monitor:

Under “Links”, I set 0 to 100% of the right of Machine 1 goes to 0 to 100% of Machine 2, and then pressed “+” button to add the link.

Next, to define moving between screens (right to left monitor), I defined the left edge of Machine 2 monitor to move (control) to Machine 1 monitor:

Under “Links”, I set 0 to 100% of the left of Machine 2 goes to 0 to 100% of Machine 1, and then pressed “+” button to add the link.

I pressed “Start” on both Synergy consoles and I could now move my control between screens.

It is interesting to note that Synergy does not conflict with Ultra VNC. So yes, you can run Synergy and VNC both simultaneously. (I use VNC’s file transfer capability between two Windows machines—don’t ask why.)

1. The workstation handles the heavy stuff, while the notebook lets me do my regular office chores. [←]
2. Please note that this is not two monitors and one machine, but actually two monitors, two machines controlled using one console—keyboard and mouse. Some people prefer using the hardware solution like the KVM switch, but I like the software way—simpler, better and no additional hardware required. [←]
3. To find the IP address of each machine, do this: Start→Run. Type cmd and in the opening DOS window, type ipconfig /all. Lookup the IP address in the resulting list. [←]

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