Way Kool KVM (not) .. 2 PC's, 1 Keyboard

Ok, all that and a bag of chips.

So I sit at home with my laptop and anytime I want to put something up on the mediaPC in my house to show others I need to VNC into the machine, then use my Laptop's keyboard and mouse to control the machine.

This little tool allows you to create a "virtual desktop" accross machines and OS's. One machine is the "server" which means thats the active keyboard and mouse. Load a client on the other PC and then create a config that says client is to the right of server and server is to the left of client. Now drag your mouse off the right side of the server and you are now on the client.

Confused ? its ok, actually when setting it up I screwed up a few times myself. Interesting little side note, you can make your own pc a neighbor to itself (ok, explain that one). My machine is named goofy, in synergy goofy is to the left of goofy, goofy is to the right of goofy, goofy is above goofy and of course goofy is below goofy. How goofy am I now, well drag the cursor off the top and it shows up on the bottom. Yep go off the left and it pops on the right. Cute trick huh ?

But back to the main reason it exists. Now I can have 2 pc's and 2 monitors on my desk without needing 2 mice and 2 keyboards or some silly KVM.

Rick

Virtualization for the Masses

Ok, why YAVp (Yet Another Virtual product). Well this one distinguishes itself in several ways:

• The "Host" (Host is the Virutal Enviorn running the Guests), can be a Windows, Solaris x86 or Linux OS.
• The Guests can be many different OS's including Windows, Solaris, Linux, Dos, OS/2, etc.
• The Host machine does NOT require VT-x or AMD-V hardware support. It does its own run-time re-write of the offending code.

I use VB to run several linux platforms on my laptop and when they are stable I migrate the disk image to my production linux farm when I am happy.

Some thoughts on the VTx vs. Virtualbox stratigies:

http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2007/10/01/should-you-enable-intels-vt-x-in-virtualbox/

Windows Scripting

After looking at WinBatch 2007 and wondering how 5250/3720 terminal emulation was a "2007" upgrade (instead of a 1987 upgrade) and their pricing model I stumbled on AutoIT

Need to understand a bit about programming, but you can create slick interfaces without the overhead of C.

This replaces Perl/TK in my book for windows scripting (tho I wish they had a linux port, I would give it 5 Stars in that case)

Making Windows File Copy Better

Teracopy from codesector is a nice add-in that punches up the speed of copies. It does it by removing the local "windows cache" feature and using rawread and rawwrite when accessing the files.

Useful Keystrokes

Keystroke	Function
Alt + Enter	Opens the Properties page of a selected item
Alt + Spacebar	In the active window, this brings up the corner dialog box for Move, Size, Minimize, Maximize, or Close
Shift + Delete	Permanently deletes an item (rather than sending it to the Recycle Bin)
Ctrl + Esc	Opens the Start menu (Windows Key)
Ctrl + Shift + Esc	Opens the Windows Task Manager
F6	Cycles through the elements that can be selected in a screen or window
F10	Selects the menu bar in the active program (usually the File menu) so that you can use the arrow keys to navigate through the menus and the Enter key to display one
Shift + F10	Displays a shortcut menu for an item (like right-clicking with the mouse)

Defragging the Windows XP Boot Process

So aparently there is another "defragger" in XP, meant to improve boot times.

check
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOptimizeFunction

Enable should be Equal to Y, check OptimizeComplete and OptimizeError to see if it worked last time, rebooting will

To initiate it manually
Start->Run: rundll32 advapi32 ProcessIdleTasks

http://www.tutorials-win.com/MaintainXP/DFRG-BootOptimizeFunction/


Update:

ok, While this was a useful trick, PerfectDisk8 http://www.raxco.com/products/PerfectDisk2k/ is really a killer application and made things MUCH faster on my Laptop.

A hint to this was the following (susposedly it would do it itself, I found it was easier in smaller chunks of work)

1. Remove Current Paging and Hibernation files (Control Panel/System and Control Panel/Power)
2. do an Offline defrag of just the system areas
3. Do an on-line defrag of the disk
4. re-establish your paging and hibernation files
5. do an offline defrag
6. do an online defrag

Was this overkill, maybe. Am I happy, you BET