A buddy suggested that I check out Synergy:
With synergy, all the computers on your desktop form a single virtual screen. You use the mouse and keyboard of only one of the computers while you use all of the monitors on all of the computers. You tell synergy how many screens you have and their positions relative to one another. Synergy then detects when the mouse moves off the edge of a screen and jumps it instantly to the neighboring screen. The keyboard works normally on each screen; input goes to whichever screen has the cursor.
Advantages: Fully supports all keys and mouse buttons. Synchronizes screen savers. Each screen can be (logically) positioned next to any other, they do not each have to border the system with the keyboard and mouse. Cross-platform clipboard support. Low resource utilization compared to a VNC server. Once all of the systems are connected it feels just like using one multi-headed machine.
Disadvantages: The UI falls somewhere between unfriendly and downright hostile. Uses a non-standard protocol that lacks encryption and meaningful authentication / authorization. The client does not reliably reconnect to the server and sometimes gets “stuck.” The server is the system that has the keyboard and mouse.
The bass-ackwards Client/Server relationship keeps me from really loving it. The Synergy client does not work well for a laptop that travels from desk to desk and must connect to different servers, and even for my two stationary desktops at work it is not reliable enough to permanently remove the keyboard from one.
That said, I’m going to hang on to Synergy at work because I have to keep an extra keyboard and mouse handy anyway for working on servers at my desk (with a 2-port KVM so I don’t have to disconnect them from the Linux box). I’ll stick with win2vnc at home since it “just works” and I’m not using the laptop at my desk very much…
stumbled across your old post from a google search on win2vnc. Does synergy work better these days than it did back when you posted this? I would appreciate an email if you have an answer.
Later releases have been much more robust and I continue to use Synergy daily. Initial setup could be easier but once everything is configured it works great.