At work, several people have left in the last year or so, and no one has been hired (at least, no one in not-India) to replace them.  This has resulted in several empty cubicles with equipment sitting in them going unused.  So a few weeks ago, just before Christmas, I took an extra monitor that was just lying around and set up my computer for a two-screen display.  You may recall from a previous post that I have four computers under my desk.  Well I came up with a way to use two switch boxes to give myself access to three of the four machines (the other I’ll still use remote administration for), while still keeping my main machine outputting on two screens.  Check out my schematic (blue lines are video, black are keyboard/mouse):

If that seems a little complicated, that’s because it is. :)  Here is a table of which switch box needs to be switched to what in order to use different arrangements:

The only problem I’m running into is from daisy-chaining the keyboard from one switchbox to another.  The mouse seems to work okay though.  Maybe it’s because the mouse is natively USB, but the keyboard runs through a PS/2->USB adapter (these are USB-only switch boxes).  I suppose a four-way switch box would be a much better option, then I could just have one screen run straight to my main computer and run the switchbox on the other.  But I wanted to do this without having to ask IT for any stuff that isn’t lying around in empty cubes.

I’m currently using the top half of this image as my two-screen display (as seen below).