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I have two computers at home (Windows XP and Windows 7), but one monitor for both of them. They are connected to this monitor using different interfaces: DVI and VGA.

I'm also using one keyboard and one mouse to control both PCs with the help of Synergy or Input Director. But I still need to manually switch between monitor interfaces.

Is there some way (software) that will switch the interfaces (turn off the monitor), when reaching the edge of the screen with the mouse?

Until now I found several answers, which help to avoid pressing hardware buttons, but still can not do the job automatically based on mouse pointer coordinates.

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don't know but i think the normal way with multiple computers and one keyb monitor and mouse, is a KVM Switch. It's hardware, but you switch from one computer to another or between 2 computers, with a keyboard shortcut. – barlop Mar 23 '12 at 1:05
Is the intention here that if you are in W7 and move the mouse to a position on the screen, W7 will go into powersave mode for the screen, which will then cause the VGA input to auto selected for XP? Even if you could do this, how would you get back? Once you did the same on XP, both OSs would have powered down their screens. – Paul Mar 23 '12 at 2:11
@barlop, yes, I know about KVMs, but the idea was to save some money, to have less wires on the table and to avoid pressing a button every time you switch between PCs. The first 2 are solved with the help of Synergy and alternatives. And I'd like the third (pressing the monitor button) get done automatically, too. – evgeny9 Mar 23 '12 at 10:28
@Paul, you got my intention perfectly right. It's strange, but it works with my monitor: maybe it starts polling the interfaces, when one is switched off? – evgeny9 Mar 23 '12 at 10:38
Yeah, I did the same thing once, with my monitor if there was an active DVI, then it didn't matter if the VGA was live, so I only need to shutdown the dvi to switch, and then liven it to get it back (by moving the cursor back in to it). I used nircmd bound to a hotkey to turn off the screen. – Paul Mar 23 '12 at 12:05

2 Answers

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You can use the Hot Corners utility to power off the screen in windows once you reach a corner.

This would mean altering your flow a little, and when moving off the edge from Windows 7 to XP, you would make sure the mouse passes through the top or bottom corner that you have designated as the hot corner.

The second image in the link shows the option to power down the screen.

On the XP side, if you used a different corner, ie, use the upper right corner exiting from W7 to XP and the lower left corner to exit from XP back to W7 then each OS should note the mouse cursor moving on entry and power up the screen. Otherwise you might hit the hot corner designated for power-down when re-entering the screen.

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thank you, it's the software I needed. But don't you know, is there any freeware alternative? – evgeny9 Mar 23 '12 at 10:40
Found Hot Corners 2, free - maybe it'll be of use for someone. – evgeny9 Mar 23 '12 at 13:55
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I've been having a similar issue myself; I have two monitors and two computers, but use both monitors for each computer (one on DVI inputs, one on DisplayPort). Not finding any obvious solutions, I went ahead and tried to fix it myself :)

The end result is that I've added some code to synergy that will automatically tell your monitor to switch inputs when the mouse leaves a particular display. I'm still testing it out, but so far it's working quite well for my purposes!

I'm happy to share my changes (either in source or binary form), but you should know that it's sort of a half-baked solution that's designed more for my scenario (where all monitors are shared and I only have 2 PCs). I'm not sure if I'll ever get around to a more 'general purpose' configurable solution...

UPDATE 4/28 Since this has been working well for me, I'm happy to share out a Windows installer with my changes. Source code is available upon request in case anyone wants to improve upon this.

Download link (private build): synergy-1.4.8-Windows-x86.exe

Sample configuration file

Instructions:

  1. Download and install synergy-1.4.8-Windows-x86.exe from my dropbox link above. Make sure to uninstall any previous versions of Synergy.
  2. Copy the configuration file to the proper place on your computer, and use the Synergy UI to point it at that file.
  3. Update the configuration file for your system. In my default config file, I have 2 PCs (Cosmo and Pinot), and each is connected to the same 2 monitors (Cosmo with DVI-D, Pinot with DisplayPort). I have turned off the auto-mouse linking in favor of hotkeys (CTRL+F1/F2) for switching monitors/inputs. I recommend you do the same, as changing monitor inputs can take a few seconds and can only be done by the current input--so if you go back and forth across the border quickly you can get in a weird state.

I've added one new configuration property to the screens section, called monitorinput. The value is the input ID to switch to when the mouse leaves that PC (so it's a little backwards from how you might expect it to be written, as you set the input of the other PC). The values I'm aware of:

  • 1: Analog (VGA)
  • 3: DVI-D
  • 15: DisplayPort

If these don't work, or if you have additional inputs, you can download a tool called softMCCS which will give you the DDI/CI information from your monitor, including which input IDs are supported.

As you can see from the example, I set monitorinput = 15 for Cosmo (meaning, when leaving Cosmos set the input to DisplayPort which is what Pinot uses), and monitorinput = 3 for Pinot (meaning, when leaving Pinot set the input to DVI-D which is what Cosmo uses). It only really supports two PCs at this point.

That should be enough to get you up and running; let me know if it works (or if you have issues). Hope this helps!

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thank you for the response. Couldn't you share your code somehow (binary form is preferred)? – evgeny9 Apr 26 '12 at 23:27
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Yes, I'm willing to share this out. I've been using it for the past week and it's actually been working quite well for me! Of course, it's still highly customized for my scenarios, but as long as you've got a similar setup it should be fine for you as well. I'll edit my answer above with download links and instructions. I won't be able to provide much support, though. – Dan Apr 28 '12 at 15:31

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