How to Access Your Computer Remotely with a VNC KVM

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I have a monitor hooked up to one MacBook Pro, the other monitor hooked up to my Vista desktop machine, and the other MacBook Pro all sitting on the desk here. I have ONE mouse, and ONE keyboard. Now… watch as I play around and move things on all three screens using that one little mouse.

No, I’m not using the Synergy software I had planned to use for this. It’s a pain to install and configure, and it wouldn’t even work. It hasn’t been updated since 2006, and didn’t want to work with Vista or Leopard. So again I turned to my chat room at live.pirillo.com to find an answer. iKteck, who is one of our chat moderators, suggested a totally free program called Win2Vnc. What’s that you said… FREE? I love free, so I went to check it out.

This little program is amazing. The primary machine needs to be a Windows machine. It acts as a VNC Viewer and will connect to any other machine where the VNC service is enabled and running. You cannot drag and drop things from one screen to another, no. To set it up, you simply need to tell the host machine which direction (N, S, E, W) the other machine(s) are from it, and then when you move your mouse in that direction, it will switch over to that machine/system. It can’t get any simpler than that. How it works:

The program will open a small (one pixel wide) window on the edge of your screen. Moving the pointer into this window will trigger the program to take over your mouse and send mouse movements and keystrokes though the RFB protocol to a VNC server running on another machine. When the pointer is moved back towards the opposite edge on the other screen, the mouse is returned to your primary display.

Now, this only works if the host machine is a Windows machine. When I make the final switch over to Leopard as my primary system, I will likely use Teleport at that time. It only works between Mac machines, which is all I will be using then anyway.

All in all, I have to say: Win2Vnc FTW. It’s an excellent program that just works… for free. It doesn’t get better than that.

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