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Input Director

Using Multiple Computers with One Keyboard and Mouse

Input Director allows you to control two or more computers with one keyboard and mouse.

Input Director is an amazing piece of free software that works like a kvm (keyboard video mouse) switch that allows you to control two or more computers with one mouse and keyboard provided all the computers are Windows machines and that they are all networked together.

Control two computers with one keyboard and mouse

Input Director

I have an XP desktop networked wirelessly to a laptop running Vista. The laptop is on my desk to the left of my desktop PC. With Input Director running (I have it configured to automatically run on start-up on both machines), I can move my desktop mouse off the XP screen and onto the Vista laptop's screen and control the laptop with my desktop mouse and keyboard without touching the laptop. What's more, I can use the Clipboard to copy and paste across both machines. That's totally awesome!

Input Director

Of course I have them networked together and I can move files from one to the other using the wireless LAN but the ability to control both machines with one keyboard and mouse and the ability to copy and paste only the portions of documents that I want across both machines so effortlessly is pretty awesome. Plus, moving things from one computer to another with Input Director is much more simple and faster than doing the same thing using my network, provided I'm not trying to move a huge amount of data.

If you decide to try Input Director, you can download it just by Googling "input director" but do yourself a favor and click open the Quickstart Guide. You'll see it just below the Download link on the Google page. Here's a link to Input Director Quickstart Guide. You'll want to copy the information on that page and another page that you'll find a link to at the bottom of the first page and paste them both into a text file that you'll be able to open on the Desktops of the computers you will be linking. It will become obvious to you how handy that will be once you start configuring the program on your computers.

More Amazing Features of Input Director

You can pull up a file that has text in it and copy all or a portion of the text to the Clipboard and then move the mouse pointer off the Master computer and actually onto the Slave computer's screen and paste that text into a document open on that screen. Or you can you can do the same thing from the Slave to the Master.

Input Director

To me, that in itself is amazing enough but Input Director can also be configured to move folders that have files nested in other folders from one computer to another. Suppose you had a folder on your Desktop with some huge jpegs and other files and another folder nested inside it with more huge jpegs that you wanted to move to another computer you had linked with Input Director. As long as you had Input Director configured properly, you would need only to right-click that folder and click Copy and then move your mouse off that computer screen and onto the other computer and right-click the Desktop there and click Paste. Almost instantly the folder is copied in the new location.

If you decide to download and use this amazing free program, you'll have to tweak it, once you have it installed on the computers you intend to use it on, in order to be able to move files and folders this way. You can copy and paste text from one document to another right out of the box but it won't let you move whole folders or files until you've made a minor adjustment to the program.

O.K. so here's the tweak to make that happen. Go ahead and download the software to all the computers you intend to use it on and install it and get it completely configured so that it works and you can move your mouse from one screen to the other. You should now be able to copy test to the Clipboard and move the mouse to an open document on the other computer and paste that text into it. But in order to be able to move a whole folder you will need to do this: Double-click the Input Director's icon in your Systems Trey at the bottom right of your screen by the clock to bring it to the screen and click the Global Preference tab and un-check the box that says "Exclude default C$ D$.....shares for copy/paste". Then click the X to close it. You do this on all of the computers you have Input Director set up on and that's it. You should now be able to move whole files and folders across the machines.

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Input Director

Using Multiple Computers with One Keyboard and Mouse

Input Director allows you to control two or more computers with one keyboard and mouse.

More Amazing Features of Input Director

Thanks For Visiting the Tech Pages

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