I’ve mentioned The Garage a number of times here on Next and Jay Greene also wrote a story recently about some Garage projects recently for Cnet.
Today it gives me great pleasure to announce a free download resulting from a Garage project. To recap quickly, The Garage is both a physical space in Building 4 at our Redmond HQ, and a company wide program that encourages grass roots invention, tinkering, ideas and incubation of projects. In The Garage,employees get together after hours to build whatever they dream up and the results are often impressive. 99.9% of the Garage projects either ship as part of a Microsoft project or remain internal, but every once in a while there’s a project that doesn’t fit into any existing Microsoft product which will get a lot of request from employees who want to be able to share it with their friends and families. In exceptions like this, the Garage community will rally together to and publish it as a standalone public download.
That's what's happening today with Mouse Without Borders.
Mouse Without Borders is a project I’ve been familiar with for the last 6 months or so and it’s a wonderfully useful tool. In a nutshell, it allows you to reach across your PC's as if they were part of one single desktop. I have two PCs on my desk at work connected to 3 LCD screens and using Mouse Without Borders I can move my mouse between the 3 screens, even though one of them is attached to a different PC from the other two. What’s more, I can move files between the 2 computers simply by dragging them from one desktop to another. In fact you can control up to four computers from a single mouse and keyboard with no extra hardware needed – it’s all software magic, developed by Truong Do who by day is a developed for Microsoft Dynamics. The software is easy to setup and in addition to enabling drag and drop of files, you can lock or log in to all PCs from one PC, and as a whimsical bonus is it allows you to customize your Windows logo screen with the daily image from Bing or a local collection of pictures :) I regularly use it to have one PC dedicated to social media streams while I work away on my other PC connected to two screens.
The video above both explains and shows Mouse Without Borders far better than I can using words. The project is testament to the power of The Garage which helped Truong develop the user interface and setup the usability tests that have helped the tool become very accessible and easy to use. As well as that, The Garage and its regular Science Fairs inside Microsoft helped expose the project to 9,000 people before it was ready for external release. Now that day has arrived and I’m delighted to announce here on Next at Microsoft that Mouse Without Borders is ready for download.
Download Now [1.1mb]
I cannot seem to download on the main computer running windows 7. it downloaded on pc running xp. when downloading on other the bar does not seem to go all the way when downloading. It says finished but it is not in task bar and cannot open at all, tried it several times with no luck. Can someone help?
I bought a KVM switch to use on two PCs .... one XP and one Windows 7, All it did was crash my USB ports so that nothing worked. I hope this is a better solution. Besides...if it works as advertised, I can add my Vista PC too.... on a wireless network instead of hard wired to the KVM.
What is the OS dependency of this amazing product? I tried making it work in XP without luck. Does it need Win7?
I just downloaded to two laptops, one on Vista and one on 7. So far, looks like my Microsoft wireless mouse will work well on both laptops! Saves having to get an additional mouse. Especially helping me to move between both computers. I do a lot of photography with different software on the two computers and this should help with working between computers as well! Thanks!
Was looking at this and thought it might be useful to try at work (Public/Government Sector), but it says not for commercial use (Is government considered commercial?
Also, it due to wanting to send you guys usage information we won't even trial it which is a shame. (It seems to want IP Addresses etc).
How do you remove all traces of Microsoft mouse without boarders? I need to reinstall it without it saving the old setting. What a mess! The app leaves all kind of traces in the registry.
You know what is missing ? SOUND ! If I could hear every computer sound through 1 pair of speakers it would have been perfect :)
It would be nice if I could have not only control the remote computer but also extend the screen of a computer, using a second PC or laptop as a second screen
This is exactly I want and need for gaming
How do I send a whole folder of photos from my pc to one in another room on same network. tried drag and drop.
Nice program. Just the "ESC" key sometimes stops working and doesn't register.
download.microsoft.com/.../MouseWithoutBordersSetup.msi
Great. would it be possible to allow for running multiple instances? That way multiple users could easily share and control one screen with their own computer. Files could then also be moved to the shared computer and be picked up by the other users as they need it as if it was already on their computer.
I'm having trouble installing this on a Vista box, the XP and W7 ones are fine. Is there a log file somewhere I can see to help troubleshoot?
Sounds crazy but how about expanding to 6 monitors?