KVM is a hardware switch that allows you to use share one keyboard, monitor and mouse on multiple computers depending on the amount of port available on the KVM switch. This is normally being used on server racks where all the servers on the racks are being managed with only one physical keyboard, monitor and mouse. Although KVM switches is able to save you a lot of space by not having multiple keyboards and mouse, but it still involves a lot of cables and can be quite messy if you don’t manage them properly. For normal home users, they would be better off with a software KVM such as Input Director or Synergy which I have covered before. It is pretty neat because all you need to do to switch between computer is just move your mouse pointer to the monitor of the computer that you wish to control.
To get Synergy and Input Director working, you may have to set up the configuration first. However today I found another similar software called ShareMouse where you only need to run the software on the computers that is connected via network and no setup is required to share your mouse and keyboard with multiple computers. It can’t get any easier than this.
ShareMouse is able to support up to 26 computers. Other than able to share keyboard and mouse, it also shares clipboard data (CTRL+C and CTRL+V), transfer files between computers and Mac OSX and Windows cross-platform support.
To get ShareMouse working, first of all the computers must be connected via local network. Then the computers will have to run ShareMouse and it will automatically connect to each other. Now all you need to do is simply move your mouse cursor to the monitor that you want to control.
Video demo of how ShareMouse works
You can access ShareMouse configuration by clicking on the ShareMouse icon located at notification area and select Settings. You can configure quickjump hotkey, panic hotkey, inactive monitor dimming, protected mode to securely prevent unauthorized access by other ShareMouse installations, network traffic encryption, and even changing the UDP port.
You can easily organize the layout of the monitor from the Monitor Manager. For example, if you want to go to the monitor on your left, logically you would move your mouse pointer to the left rather than right, top or bottom. If for some reason ShareMouse wrongly mapped the layout of the monitor, you can re-organize it from Monitor Manager.
The features that I really like about ShareMouse is it doesn’t require installation by downloading the portable edition, works immediately by running the software without any configuration, able to easily copy files between computers by clicking the files with your mouse and dragging them to the desired computer even though the Windows sharing permission has not been setup, and most importantly is FREE for personal home use.