My Tools: Synergy

Synergy does a really simple thing, but it does it really well – it allows two PC to share the same mouse and keyboard.

When I am working from home I stand my work laptop alongside my home PC so that the monitors line up. I then start Synergy as a server on my home PC, and start it as a client on my work laptop.

Synergy then allow me to use the two systems sat next to each seamlessly switching between them by moving the mouse from one to the other.

Doing this I get all of the advantages of having multiple displays, I also get to use all of my processing power and I don’t have to worry about which applications I have available on the machine that I happen to be using, because I’m using both of them. I’m running Windows XP on one of the systems and Windows Vista on the other, so I also retain access to two different operating systems, and as it happen, two different versions of Microsoft Office too.

There are a couple of disadvantages. Because the Synergy is relying upon a network you can sometimes get glitches caused by network latency. Having said that, I’m running across a 802.11g LAN and the glitches are rare. The other disadvantage is that the system relies on some processing, so if the processor is flat out you can get problems. If you have UAC started on Vista Synergy can’t intercept the UAC Shell, but that would be expected, the nice thing about Synergy is that it doesn’t stop you using the real keyboard. These are minor issues though.

Synergy is free, open source and hasn’t changed since 2006, and still works with Vista. There’s a reasonably active patch community, but I’ve not needed to install any of the, sometimes software that works is best left alone.