It’s still used, but very rarely. Microsoft Excel is one common program that uses it. The arrow keys either navigate you from cell to cell or they scroll the entire page around, depending on whether or not scroll is active.
Yes, that’s right. Thanks for the detailed info!
What if one is a Mac and the other a PC?
I have no intent to use the company Internet connection with my personal computer. Just don’t want to get into that mess.
I know its not really what was asked for in the OP, but I’ve found this quite useful in the past, and people don’t seem to think of it as a possibility. Assuming both computers are plugged into the same network, you can easily share a keyboard and mouse with no special hardware. Its especially handy for a laptop and a desktop.
http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/
Each computer has its own monitor in this setup, but you can switch between the two by simply moving the mouse cursor off one screen onto the other one. Its as if you have one computer with a dual-screen setup. I consider this a much better solution than something like VNC, because it cuts out any lag associated with sending the display of the second computer over the network. Sending Keyboard and Mouse signals over a network effectively has no lag at all.
I keep meaning to try Synergy - the coolest thing about it is that the computers can be running different operating systems - you can slide your mouse off the edge of an Mac desktop, straight onto a Windows desktop, then off Windows straight onto a Linux Gnome desktop.
I use it at work to go between Ubuntu Linux and Windows XP. It works best if you turn off screensavers/screen lockers. I have found that if you are on Linux and your Windows XP screen auto-locks, you can not navigate to XP and do an unlock.
I have no control over the unlocks on either computer, but I don’t really need to have it since I also have a KVM. Synergy is much faster than KVM, though.
Note that XP doesn’t do well as the server host with most firewall/proxy/DHCP schemes, so you should leave it as the client if you can.
I am almost certain that IOGear KVMs can handle PC/Mac/Linux combos, but you can check that easily on their website.
I’ve tried three times to make different KVM devices work, and with the help of multiple IT people, and haven’t succeeded yet. Sooner or later somebody drops the mouse, whether the HVM has the oft referred diodes in it or not. I hear other people get them to work, but I don’t know how!
I use KVM switches all the time and have never had a problem. I currently have two in my home and four in my office at work. The older USB ones were a bit slow to switch, but the newer ones work fine. Never had a problem with the PS/2 style ones either.
I haven’t personally had to do this, but I can’t think of any reason it wouldn’t work.
Now, a question of my own. This Synergy thing, if I have two computers – one main and one server – and two monitors, would I be able to normally run my main computer in its usual dual-monitor mode and only use Synergy on the infrequent instances that I need to do things on the server? It sounds like each computer would need its own monitor (it says it’s not a KVM), but I could be misinterpreting something…
Also, if a computer requires a user to log in to Windows, would Synergy allow a user to log in, or do both computers need to already be logged in to their respective OSes to work?
I used to have one that worked when you hit the Shift key twice. Unfortunately, I use the Shift key about 800 times an hour, as it’s a very useful extension key, so everytime I’d click it the KVM caused an annoying interruption while it waited for the possible second click, and if I actually did hit the Shift key twice within its little time period, I’d switch computers mid-activity.
Stupidest choice of action key ever. And you couldn’t change it, either. Idiot notion.
Yeah, there’s little in the way of being inconspicuous while at work with something like that. You’re better off not bothering so you don’t get fired. If someone really wanted to be an ass, using a KVM or something like VPN, or the case of a Macintosh computer a piece of pricey software called Virtual PC, you could get terminated for fraudulant computer activity or any number of things. With the crashing of planes into buildings, every human being on the planet is either planning or highly capable of some form of terrorism… I remember I was suspended from school for 3 weeks for making Terroristic Threats telling some kid I was going to bounce a kickball off his face.