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]
Here the performance is strange, if I use my desktop mouse on my notebook, it moves really bad, but if I use my notebook touchpad on my desktop, it move flawlessly.
I had no problem installing Mouse Without Borders on my Vista PC.
I try to install it on my XP, and it won't open at all. I did this 3 times and have the same issue each time.
Any suggestions?
Nice idea, but I cannot get it to work. What services are expected to be running? What other conditions are assumed but not stated and not diagnosed?
Hi!
Is existing a portable version (without installation)?
Thanks A lot.
it does not work with multiple monitors on one machine
<3 this thing... much better than all other tools like this.
a view things i would make better:
- Adjustable Port (not via regkey)
- UDP
- better handling of hotkeys (includes a definable hoteky for enable/disable easy mouse
- hidden password at setup screen
THX Microsoft!
@Sth: works fine for me.
two screens at primary computer, at the left a notebook connected, at the right my htpc
no problems so far
I'd switch to this instead of Input Director if it let me arrange my windows properly.
I have 4 monitors for my desktop horizontally, and then have my 3 laptops underneath those, but this software only supports horizontal real-estate currently, so I'll be sticking with Input Director for now.
Sounded awesome, worked great, enabling me to work more efficiently & with less hassle can only be a good thing. :)
2 x win7 & 1 x XP across 4 screens of different sizes, & almost perfect, none of the issues mentioned in previous comments except 1, & his solution did not work for me.
It is a minor one, it is not running on startup on the one xp system I still have for testing purposes, I given it is so new searching for help is not helping either :) so it is a manual start for that machine ATM.
One feature I would like to see included in the future, is the ability to place second row systems under a particular top row system, at the moment I have to effectively "go the long way" through the screen on my left, to get to the small screen directly under my main/centre screen.
I am using this software on my desktop and my living room pc thats running windows media center. About every couple of minutes the media center overlay with channel info and what not pops up. As if someone moved the mouse. But the mouse is at my desktop. It does it all the time and is annoying when watching tv.
Its like its resetting the mouse or something. Is there a way to stop this?
I cannot get it to work?
it nice it works on windows 8 evaluation as well.
Truong - Top job! 3 PC's connected up in minutes. You have made my life much, much easier.
v useful app mate! thanks
question... if one of the PC's is down, it says the PC is timedout.. which is apt.. but then shouldn't it work for the PC that is on?
Hi,
very nice feature but will it be extended in number of PC ! I have 7 PC to connect and they are not all on the same line, I mean 4 of them are on one line and 3 are on an upper line. Will it be possible to add as many computer as we have and to set their position in a free way.
The copy does not work for me between my PC on Windows 7 and one PC on Windows XP but it works the other way.
Thanks anyway !