NVISION’s slogan was “The World of Visual Computing”  but could be just as easily titled “All the cool stuff of NVIDIA partners”, because ATI and Matrox was nowhere to be seen.  But don’t get me wrong,it is a top notch event, and I plan on paying my way to attend next year so I can experience everything.

HIPerWall is the first thing you see entering the convention center.

The event truly covered all corners of visual computing, from hardware vendors, cutting edge technologies, famous speakers, to the largest LAN party I have set eyes on.  Any geek will find lots to love here.

GeForce LAN. “The Guinness World Record for the longest continuous LAN party with over 100 participants was set today at NVISION 08. 203 hardcore gamers kept going for 36 straight hours!” – NVISION Highlights

k|ngp|n attempting to break world records right on the showroom floor at the EVGA booth.

Wallace Santos, President & CEO of MAINGEAR, checking out the friendly competition over at the SIM Factory booth.

I met with some of the best case modders in the world including fellow [H]ardForum member craigbru who completed Project: Rogue (on right) which was featured on the HardOCP.com homepage.

Later this week when I return from my trip you can expect full writups from the booths that were MultiMonitor related.

If your looking for the end-all review of the  Matrox TripleHead2Go Digital Edition from a no B.S. site thats not afraid to fail a product then look no further. Brent Justice over at my favorite hardware site www.hardocp.com just posted their take on it.  For the product to get this high of a reward from the [H] is no small feat and should not be taken lightly.  Head on over for an install and setup breakdown that really tells you whats going on with that  PowerDesk-SE app, game by game breakdowns, and really-really-really big screen shots.

Reviews of the newly released Digital (read DVI) versions of the DualHead2Go and TripleHead2Go are popping up. Sadly some of these sites have probibly never seen the product judging by the textbook paragraphs (from the manual) and stock images. I mean the Latitude D810 is soo’ 2005.

Stick to reviews from more reputable sites sutch as this great one from DarkSaber at TechPowerUp. They do it right with unboxing photos, complete with naked PCB hotness’!

Day 1 – Today I decided to really thoroughly test synergy, and the best way to find out if you really love or hate something is to use it on your personal PC every day, for better or worse I am going along for this ride.

My main PC has dual screens, and I would really like to maximize my desk space so I stole the “Guest PC” from my other desk and set it up on my desk. With a 24 inch in the middle and a 19 inch on each side I feel like I am getting a tan when I turn on both PC’s after squeezing all three monitors onto my desktop.

Day 3 – I am lazy and haven’t setup synergy yet, I am using both PC’s using 2 sets of keyboards and mice. It’s really frustrating when I start typing on the wrong keyboard, or move the wrong mouse. I don’t think I will ever get used to having two. I will most likely install tomorrow, but I felt adding today’s entry was important because I am experiencing all the frustrations Synergy is suppose to solve.

The only thing I do not like about this setup is I am used to having all my chat and messenger windows open to my right, and now my secondary screen is to the left. It’s weird to move the mouse left to a new screen for me, I will let you know how I adapt.

Day 4 – The guest PC is fully patched and updated. Installing and configuring Synergy took all of 30 seconds after following my first write-up instructions. http://multimonitor.net/2007/06/throw-out-your-kvm%e2%80%99s-synergy-does-it-right-part-1/

Writing today’s entry is simple, it is natural for me to copy a URL from my main PC and paste it into this review. The clipboard copying is a sweet bonus.

And it works with images too! (Not files, copying screen shots or in paint.)

Adding automatic startup is as easy as clicking a single button and synergy will start on boot and the PC’s will automatically connect.

Day 5 – I realized today that when I type on a full screen E-Mail or Word document on a secondary monitor I tend to move the mouse pointer out of the way and onto the main screen. This causes a problem with synergy setups because your keystrokes go to the PC with the mouse. I catch myself typing a couple letters and nothing will show up on the slave PC’s word processor until I figure out my mouse is on the master PC and I just accidentally searched Google, oops.

Day 9 – When games or movies are running in full screen mode and the cursor leaves to the other PC’s desktop weird things happen, like the start bar shows up over the full screen application, or in other cases the sound and/or video stops. No thing to be critical about, as soon as you move the cursor back to the main PC all is well.

Day 10 – Having the “Guest PC” to my right is driving me bonkers. Rather than training myself to stop pushing the mouse out of the way to type, I swapped the guest pc over to the left of my main monitor, and my secondary monitor on my gaming PC went to the right. Ahhh, this is much more fluid and natural. Everything behaves the way I like. Cursor out of the way, Chat to my right, and torrents to my left. Live is good, and very accessible.

Day 13 – Not a single crash, or other issue. Synergy has been running for days and every time I boot, the PC’s Sync like magic without any intervention. This is definitely a very stable product. One feature I wish I had was the ability to change an option on the Guest PC’s synergy (Sync Screen Saver check box) without having to plug in a mouse and keyboard to the system and stop synergy. But there are so very few options that this miner issue is barely worth noting.

Day 14 – I have been full screen gaming pretty regularly with Synergy and have not had one issue. I guess it’s good to point out that whenever you are using an application that does have issues with the mouse leaving the screen such as a first person shooter with Mouse-look, you get used to pressing Scroll Lock button to disable synergy. Most games do not have the key mapped to anything and you can game on without an issue.

Day 15 – I am writing this entry on my guest PC while waiting for the next round of Supreme Commander to begin. I feel I can use both PC’s like a pro! I really enjoy the ease and benefits of Synergy and I am now wondering about what the limitations are.

Day 20 – I set up a laptop with Synergy and configured it to be a 3^rd PC, and my 4^th monitor. Just as I suspected it works like a charm. A couple setting tweaks and I enabled screen wrapping so when the cursor rolls off the utmost right screen it appears to my left. Too easy! A couple tweaks more on the server settings and the laptop is now below the primary monitor in a “T” formation. I imagine you could set up a 4 PC setup in a 2×2 formation if you wanted to control multiple PC’s with little mouse movement but the configuration could get confusing and may need to be written down to get it just right. Here is where Synergy could really benifit from a GUI where you can drag monitor icons around.

Day 22 – I have noticed that when you have the push to talk key set in Ventrillo and the cursor leaves this system while you are pushing the key, it stays pressed. This could lead to an embarrassing situation whenever some application leaves the microphone on. The same thing happens in WoW. When running using the “W” key, I continue running if the mouse leaves the main PC. Bringing the mouse back into the host system resets the key. I would consider this a minor issue, because most games and professional applications are not affected by this.

Day 25 – With the addition of a second 8800GTS onto my Gaming PC the time to review Synergy is coming to an end. I need all 3 monitors to begin breaking testing the next cool app’. All 3 monitors are hooked up my main PC, but the utmost right LCD’s VGA is hooked up to both PC’s. Now i can still access the Guest PC with synergy, I push the input button on the monitor to switch to the VGA source.

Part 1 – Basic Usage
I took some time out of my busy schedule to take the latest version of Synergy for a spin and I was pleasantly surprised that free software could get this good, but it is still not perfect.

Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It’s intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s).

Once configured correctly you can easily move your mouse to the edge of the screen and onto the desktop of the next computer. Setting up Synergy was not effortless and may discourage many possible users who could benefit from using it.

The setup guide was not perfect so below is the procedure I took to get it up and running (after a bit of trial and error).

Edit: Users have reported best results if you do not change the master servers name to “Master” Instead keep the computer name as it is. If you have questions or problems post them in the comments and I will assist you the best I can.

1. Start on Slave-A first.
a. Grab the EXE from http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/ and install on the Slave-A PC.
b. Run the Synergy Shortcut
c. Click “Advanced” and set the screen name to “Slave-A”, then click O.K.
d. From the main menu, at the Other Computer Host Name box, type “Master”
e. Click “Start” and you are all set here.

2. Start the Master last.
a. Grab the EXE from http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/ and install on the Master PC.
b. Run the Synergy Shortcut
c. Select the second radio knob titled “Share this computer…”
d. Click the “Configure” button below it.
e. In the screens & Links window is where you stitch the monitors together.
f. Click the + under Screens and add a screen called “Master” and click OK
g. Click the + under Screens and add a screen called “Slave-A” and click OK (spelling is important)
h. To allow the mouse to pass right into the Slave-A (red arrow) you need to set the first link to read:
i. “0 to 100% of the Right of Master goes to 0 to 100% of Slave-A”
ii. Click the plus to save it.
i. To allow the mouse to pass back to the master (Blue Arrow) you need:
i. “0 to 100% of the Left of Slave-A goes to 0 to 100% of Master”
ii. Click the plus to save it.
j. Click “Advanced” and set the screen name to “Master”, then click O.K.
k. Now that the mouse can pass both ways and you see both listed under links you can click OK then click Start.

Adding the links seems to be the trickiest part for anyone trying it for the first time but if you read it out loud you will understand it and will be adding multiple slave’s and looping the screens in no time! A GUI where you can drag and drop squares to represent computers would easily half its difficulty for first timers, but I would rather it be free than easy.
You have the ability to copy-paste text from one PC to the next but that’s about it, dragging windows and files are stopped at the border. I am not aware of the limit to the amount of PC’s you can setup, but knowing the Open Source community, there are usually no artificial caps in place. You may need to stop the application to play full screen games or to change settings, a minor annoyance.

I could easily use Synergy almost daily at work, but home use might be another story. Thorough testing of that is still needed.

Thank you for reading this far, and stay tuned for Part. 2