Microsoft's Mouse Without Borders connects four PCs
New software lets you flit between four PCs with one mouse and keyboard, and even copy and paste between them. Let the sharing commence.
Controlling more than one computer usually means unplugging your mouse and keyboard and hooking them up again. (That's unless you have a KVM switch hooked up that'll do the flipping for you.) But now new software lets you control up to four PCs at once using just one mouse and keyboard. Hey — it's about as close as we're going to come to operating a supercomputer.
Mouse Without Borders is the brainchild of Truong Do, a Microsoft developer originally from Hanoi. Working at Microsoft's Garage — the company's program for employees to dedicate time to their own projects — he came up with a way of controlling up to four PCs on the same wi-fi network, no switching required.
It works pretty seamlessly, judging from the promotional video, just as if you were using the same computer with multiple monitors hooked up. You can even drag and drop files from one desktop to another, just like that. No more hunting around for a spare USB key, then cursing when you find out it's only a 64MB one you were given years ago.
The software is free to download now, from here.
Editor of microsoft.com/next Steve Clayton writes: "The software is easy to setup and in addition to enabling drag and drop of files, you can lock or log in to all PCs from one PC, and as a whimsical bonus is it allows you to customize your Windows logo screen with the daily image from Bing or a local collection of pictures :)
"I regularly use it to have one PC dedicated to social media streams while I work away on my other PC connected to two screens."
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