You may remember that last week I considered the possibility that Microsoft was trying to drive me insane because my PC had suddenly and for no accountable reason shown an unusually high processor load (about 40%) from deferred procedure calls (DPC) which, a week later, just as mysteriously dropped back to the expected level (about 2%).
Well, two days ago and still for no obvious reason, the DPC processor load went back up again! I am starting to think my PC is possessed. I am sure I could fix the problem by rebuilding the system, but then I’d never know what the cause was. On the other hand, I’m no closer to finding the answer so maybe I’ll just give up and face the rebuild that I’ll have to eventually do anyway. Rats.
Back before my DPC problems, I had decided that the unspeakable chaos that I am pleased to call my office needed to be cleaned up and reorganized. I had two desks, one for my Windows machine and the other for my Mac, so I got rid of one desk and put the computers on a cart next to the remaining desk.
I had intended to use a single monitor — my gorgeous 23-inch Apple Cinema display — for all the machines, which gave me the opportunity to test an Aten CS1764 keyboard/video/mouse switch, which also handles USB connections and sound. The video support is DVI and, since the PC doesn’t have a DVI interface, I also used an Aten VC-160 VGA to DVI converter.
The switch, which is small and has a nice solid feel, was completely painless to get running, and the image on the Cinema display from the Mac via the switch was perfect, but there was no display when I switched to the PC. I tried connecting the PC via the converter directly to the display and still nothing. So far Aten hasn’t got back to me so I’ll update you when I find out what’s wrong.
Anyway, the upshot was that I realized that I might as well skip the switch and just use all of my monitors. So, now on my desk I have the Cinema display and another display connected to the Mac and still another display connected to the PC. Kind of looks like mission control.
But now I had two keyboards and two mice, and that’s just annoying. The solution? Synergy.
Synergy is an open source freeware utility that allows you to share a keyboard and mouse among several PCs connected by TCP/IP, whether they are running Windows, OS X, Linux or other flavors of Unix.
With Synergy you set up one machine as a server. Which machine gets the focus is determined by the Synergy software detecting your mouse being moved to the edge of a display. The server then determines which display is defined as adjacent and routes the keyboard and mouse data to the required machine. The relative positions of displays can not only be left and right, they can also be up and down, which allows for pretty much any display layout you can come up with.
The Synergy software works like a dream! I set up the server on my Mac and the Windows PC as a client and it all just works! If you have multiple machines and monitors on your desk you have to try this.
I then found SynergyKM, which provides a GUI wrapper for Synergy, but only under OS X. This tool makes installation and configuration, which were simple in the original version, almost brain-dead easy.
