When I got my mom’s laptop for Xmas I did the jump and installed W7 beta. W7 runs smooth, nothing to say about that. I still regret the fact that it is not possible to do firewire networking and i deeply regretted the fact that I could not run Synergy, or at least i thought i couldn’t.
The reason why synergy is important to me is because when I work at home (read at student residences) my desk is quite small and I like to use several computers and monitors at the same time. It helps me multitask and use multiple OSs without having to either multi-boot or run many VMs on a single computer.
My room workspace is composed as follows:
- 1 Mac Mini G4, first gen. connected via DVI to a 15″ LCD monitor. It runs Mac OS X
- 1 Home computer that serves a multi-purpose server and development machine runing Ubuntu Linux. Connected via DVI to a 21″ DELL LCD monitor and dual-mon via VGA to the same SONY as the Mac Mini
- 1 HP notebook given by my mom Xmas of 2008 running Windows 7 beta. It is usually connected in dual-mon to the DELL 21″.
My studies are in computer science and creative media. Sometimes I need to run a specific os for development or work but I might prefer another one for image editing or word processing. This mainly depends on what software I have installed and also the power of the computers since the “youngest” computer I got is already 3 years old but would perform already a lot faster than the other two for resource intensive tasks.
As you can see I have 2 monitors that have both of their inputs being used. by the press of a button i can switch between OSs displayed ona given mon but i cannot switch the keyboard and mouse as easily. Synergy was the perfect tool for me… and still is.
Apparently the only thing I had to do was to run it as an Administrator and not try to run it as a service. I can now happily use 1 keyboard and mouse for the three computers.
You can get synergy here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/synergy2/