Woo hoo! I’ve finally got Windows 7 RC installed on both of my machines at home and I have been able to play around with Homegroup a little. It’s kind of cool. Since I have been using Win 7 at home, when I go to work and back to Server 2008 and Vista I have to remember that I can’t do some of the new cool things like maximize a window only vertically or drag to un-maximize.
One of my machines is hooked up to the TV so that I can watch a few sows I like on hulu. But it started getting frustrating getting up and down to switch to other shows, or whatever.
So I started looking into ways to control that machine. I tried Remote desktop since it was already on the machine, but it would log the console account out when I logged in, so it can’t work.
Next I tried Remote Assistance since it was also already installed but it took going back and forth between between machines a couple of times to gain control, and the shortcuts were only good for a short amount of time. The cool part was that I could actually see both screens on that computer in the remote assistance window, and since the the TV is rather fuzzy at computer resolutions, it was nice to be able to read the screen in the window. It is nice but limited.
But being able to see the screen locally isn’t necessary. What if I could just move the cursor to the other machine? I heard of a program at work which did just that but I hadn’t caught the name of the program. So at home I did a search and found Synergy, which is just the program I had been hearing of, a virtual KM switch. So far it is working nicely, I’ll have to see how it works over the long term.
