Best Free Keyboard and Mouse Control Software

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As the price of workstation PCs and monitors continues to drop, many computer users including designers and productivity achievers have opted for more than one PC at their desk. If you're of them, your desk surface might be cluttered with keyboards and mice unless you're lucky enough to have a custom-built working area with the appropriate bells and whistles. Otherwise it would be ideal to cut down on the I/O peripherals for productivity and real estate convenience, using either of these methods:

Mechanical KVM (Keyboard-Video-Mouse) switches are a good option, but since you have multiple monitors, they don't always offer the total solution.  Different models and types of KVMs may not play well with specific mice or work without the video plugged in. Bottom line: you may have to test several types before you find the perfect setup.

Software KVM switches allow a smooth keyboard transition from one PC to another using your LAN connection. You can move the mouse cursor to the edge of your monitor (or multi-monitors) screen and it will automatically transfer control to the other PC. If you prefer to use the keyboard, there's an alternative of pressing a set of (programmable) hot keys. The overall effect is having single, multi-monitor system even though you're using more than one PC.

Keyboard and mouse control software applies KVM switches and lets you share a mouse and a keyboard between multiple networked computers without the need for additional hardware.

Here's a graphic to show the basic functions:

As you can see, it has some pretty cool capabilities. One of the exceptions is that you can't move programs or windows from one PC to the other, but most applications including the two I reviewed here allowed the copy/paste functions between PCs.

Input Director is my favorite among the two. Mostly because it's the simplest to use.  The drawback is that it's only engineered for Microsoft products.  Since I only use Vista and XP for productivity, that isn't an issue with me.

Synergy is a little more complicated to install, but it does have the advantage of being cross-platform with Unix and Mac OS X capabilities.

I hope this helps the budding ubergeek with a few less miles of spinning in his chair looking for the right keyboard.