Sharing one keyboard and mouse on multiple computers makes sense. Many of us have more than 1 computers but don’t want too many mess cables around or multiple mouses and keyboards that can confuse us. That’s why there are free software such as Input Director and Synergy that allows you to easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware.

Well what about installing multiple mouse and keyboard on one computer? I’ve tried installing 2 mouse on my laptop and it doesn’t make a difference because both mouse shares the same cursor. However, when doing presentation or brainstorming on one computer with a few people, having multiple mouse and keyboard really helps. Check out the flash animation below and you’ll get the idea.

As you can see, the job gets done much faster. Here’s a software called TeamPlayer that allows you to use multiple mouse and keyboard on one single computer.
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TeamPlayer allows you to connect multiple mouse and keyboards to one PC. You will now be able to share your computer with a number of people. This will be a new experience and will require some getting used to. After you’ve done so, you will probably not want to go back. As you can see at the screenshot below, I have 3 mouse installed on my laptop and each mouse has its own cursor.

You might be surprised how EASY it is to get this working. Only requires 3 simple step without any configuration.

1. Connect your extra mice and keyboards
Plug in your extra USB mice and keyboards. Add a USB hub if you don’t have enough USB ports.

2. Install the software
Locate your TeamPlayer set up file and double click it. Then follow the on-screen instructions. TeamPlayer will start right after installation. During start up, in the right hand bottom of your screen, you will see how many devices TeamPlayer has discovered.

3. Take control by clicking your Left Mouse Button
Move your mice around. The mouse with a white cursor (and a little colored square) has windows control. If someone else wants to take control, he or she can simply click his left mouse button to take control.

TeamPlayer is free for personal and educational use for a maximum of 3 users. More than that, you’ll have to purchase their license. According to the research and experience of TeamPlayer developers, they recommend a limitation of participation to 30 users. This number enables optimized group dynamics. More than that, it’s going to be chaotic.

TeamPlayer is too simple that it has some limitations. TeamPlayer doesn’t detect new devices in real-time. So if you’ve added any mouse or keyboard, you’ll have to close TeamPlayer and run it again. It is also a known issue that the screen flickers when you use TeamPlayer on application/game that uses OpenGL and also videos / codec settings. In Photoshop, Alt + KEY and CTRL + Key hotkeys won’t work when TeamPlayer is running. Switching between users on a Vista or XP machine causes the mice to lock. (logout and login resolves the problem for now)

In general tablets and whiteboards work fine – in some cases you may need to disable the driver. Finally, every keyboard will be active all the time. So make sure you only type text after you’ve agreed to this with the others in your group. Well, TeamPlayer 2.0 is still in beta. This is mainly done because they develop new features all the time. We can can surely expect more features for TeamPlayer in future.

[ Download TeamPlayer ]

[tags]teamplayer, multiple, share, mouse, keyboard[/tags]