Sharing a single keyboard and mouse across multiple computers the Free and Easy way

Although keyboard's and mouse are relatively cheap, i decided to make it a little interesting for me by sharing a keyboard and mouse across two computers.

I have one keyboard and one mouse which is connected to my desktop pc. I use the same keyboard on my laptop and desktop (something went wrong on my laptop keyboard that I am yet to fix, software problem the a much needed reformat will fix). This became irritating for me to swap the keyboard especially when i am programming on my desktop pc and need some code snippets from my laptop.

After a brief Internet search I came across two software that claimed to allow me to share a single keyboard and mouse across multiple computers over a network Synergy and Input Director.

Some more research led me to believe that Input Director was a better choice so I decided to try out Input Director first.

First I had to put my desktop computer and my laptop on a network.

Next I installed Input Director on my desktop and my laptop and run Input Director on both. Since the keyboard and mouse are connected to the desktop computer I had to tell Input Director that the desktop computer was the master and entered the IP address of the laptop indicating that it was the slave.

Input Director enabled a connection between the two machines and walla I could move my mouse from one screen to the another and I could type in both using a keyboard connected on the desktop machine without having to physically move it.

Another very useful feature of Input Director is the ability to share the Clipboard between the computers. I am able to copy code snippets on my laptop and paste these into the desktop machine.

Input Director was extremely easy to configure for me and has the following screen that allows you to control all its features:



Best of all Input Director is free and with a promise by the author to be always free.