As I've mentioned, I now have a MacBook sitting on my desk. I use it to check for Mac browser errors, to have a portable workstation that can handle Adobe CS3 applications and (when not doing those things) to have a monitor dedicated solely to email and my boss' chat window.
Synergy is a program that lets me use one mouse and keyboard to control both computers. It's a small geek miracle - I just move my mouse over to whichever monitor I'm working with and it works. It even correctly copies and pastes text across computers.
It works by having one computer acting as the host - this is the computer with the mouse and keyboard you want to use. The other computer(s) are clients and get the mouse/keyboard information over the network. This does mean that if the network is being used very heavily, the mouse or keyboard will be a bit spastic, but in general it works fine.
The PC client is downloadable here, and the Mac downloadable (called SynergyKM) is here.
Today I figured out the last, small piece of the puzzle, which is that Macs use a different set of 'alternate' buttons: fn, control, alt/option, and command (as opposed to the PC's ctrl, option/windows, and alt). Synergy can switch the keys around so that 'copy' is still ctrl+c (instead of alt+c, which is confusing when you're an old-school PC user who uses a lot of keyboard commands).
To correctly configure a PC host/Mac client, do the initial setup (well-explained here). Then, click on Configure under "Share this computer's keyboard and mouse (server)" option. Click on the host computer under "Screens" (or just double-click the one you want), and set Ctrl to Alt, and Alt to Ctrl. Simple.
For Mac server/PC client instructions, click here.Labels: Apple, computers, lifehack |
