Solved Great information. Thanks so much. Thank You!! have a docking station Its a dell WD15 wireless mouse or keyboard I am disabled

[Asuslp-Hpdtolddog]

I am new here as far to say ths is my second time. Drinkigbird helped me in a very informative way and I am greatly apprciated. I havea dell wd15 its a k001a anyway it is a thunderbolt c a and it poses no use for me to acheive 4 actvive search screens to help with my disability. Here not there,. I am i need of the best way to operate a syastem from laying at ease. all I need is the four screens I have such as 2 monitors a old windows 10 hp descktop, one asuss laptop OLDER also, and a Aspire laptop. I am looking into some foldable keyboards and some have attached boards and well You all know this. Man, please help me this old dog stay on line. I am flurent in microcontrollers and am always trying to make something. iT keeps me going. I will be glad to trade off my wd15 or maybe I have a certain oldshcool ic chip you neen. I have some good ones. in a different way. un used. I just want some help. thanks to all of you.

 

[Samir]

So you're looking for some help to make it so you can compute for 4 monitor from a laying down position, correct?

 

[Asuslp-Hpdtolddog]

knowing me, I did not put that out there correct. to clarify, I am wanting to trade my dell dockingsttion that has not been use it a wd5 k0017a ? its the one with all the 3.0+ blue ssp ports, VGA, HDHI, Display port. Bigger 160 watt power supply. I am looking for some way to ustilize my 2 laptops and one old desk top to work four screens at once I do no have a usb thunderbolt c. the best is the Ausus laptop I have is a 3.2 typa a usb. I can change stuff out but i need to keep it simple too. Maybe just a foldable keyboard a and pen mouse or air mouse. Please help, guidance, maybe I have some thing else I could trade for. I am just looking to scratch a back for a scratch back. I am willing to make it workth it

 

[Asuslp-Hpdtolddog]

I am new here as far to say ths is my second time. Drinkigbird helped me in a very informative way and I am greatly apprciated. I havea dell wd15 its a k001a anyway it is a thunderbolt c a and it poses no use for me to acheive 4 actvive search screens to help with my disability. Here not there,. I am i need of the best way to operate a syastem from laying at ease. all I need is the four screens I have such as 2 monitors a old windows 10 hp descktop, one asuss laptop OLDER also, and a Aspire laptop. I am looking into some foldable keyboards and some have attached boards and well You all know this. Man, please help me this old dog stay on line. I am flurent in microcontrollers and am always trying to make something. iT keeps me going. I will be glad to trade off my wd15 or maybe I have a certain oldshcool ic chip you neen. I have some good ones. in a different way. un used. I just want some help. thanks to all of you.

Yes sir, I am. I am wanting to use some new technology to help me link all my pc together but mostly by having 4 screens to to search and mostly hold my list of to dos. I have short term memory problems. permanentley

 

[Asuslp-Hpdtolddog]

So you're looking for some help to make it so you can compute for 4 monitor from a laying down position, correct?

Yes please

 

[Samir]

Got it.

So there's a couple of different solutions and most of them are cheap or free.

First, if you want to be able to see all 4 screens at once and essentially control and see 4 computers at once, a 4-port kvm is what you need. This will allow you to control a computer at a time using a single mouse and keyboard. And you will be able to see what's on them at any point by just looking at the screen since there's no drivers or anything like that as you are directly controlling 4x computers via hardware. Depending on what the other computers video output is like--vga, hdmi, dvi, dp, etc, you can get a kvm that works with them.

Second, if you only need to utilize the extra computers and seeing them individually would be fine, then there's Remote Desktop or RDP. You simply enable RDP access in the other computers and you can access them just like you were in front of them (with certain limitations), from the computer in front of you. And you can switch between computers too since each one when minimized is just another tab on the taskbar. This is actually what I use extensively, usually having between 5-20 computers in use at any given time for the tremendous number of things I have to handle. In fact, I'm using a computer that's not on my desk to post this reply right now.

As far as keyboard and pointing device, I'm not sure what your particular limitations are, but I switched to a trackball for both my parents and that helped them tremendously. There are many options for a keyboard including something custom so just need to figure out what works best for you.

 

[Asuslp-Hpdtolddog]

Got it.

So there's a couple of different solutions and most of them are cheap or free.

First, if you want to be able to see all 4 screens at once and essentially control and see 4 computers at once, a 4-port kvm is what you need. This will allow you to control a computer at a time using a single mouse and keyboard. And you will be able to see what's on them at any point by just looking at the screen since there's no drivers or anything like that as you are directly controlling 4x computers via hardware. Depending on what the other computers video output is like--vga, hdmi, dvi, dp, etc, you can get a kvm that works with them.

Second, if you only need to utilize the extra computers and seeing them individually would be fine, then there's Remote Desktop or RDP. You simply enable RDP access in the other computers and you can access them just like you were in front of them (with certain limitations), from the computer in front of you. And you can switch between computers too since each one when minimized is just another tab on the taskbar. This is actually what I use extensively, usually having between 5-20 computers in use at any given time for the tremendous number of things I have to handle. In fact, I'm using a computer that's not on my desk to post this reply right now.

As far as keyboard and pointing device, I'm not sure what your particular limitations are, but I switched to a trackball for both my parents and that helped them tremendously. There are many options for a keyboard including something custom so just need to figure out what works best for you.

Samir, Thank you so much. There is A bunch of KVMs out there. LOL. I will have to surf the junk to find a trackball. Yes, I am going to join some PCs together. I just want to keep my microcontroller IOT projects on a exclusive system. Also, to use a Series of HDD and SSD to save my own code. I lost 3 years of code and oh man. I have a bunch of broken incomplete files in the cloud well one drive. Anyway, the trackball looks good. I do appreciate you all SNBForums. You are very nice. Thanks for teaching this old dog a new trick. LOL

 

[Samir]

Samir, Thank you so much. There is A bunch of KVMs out there. LOL. I will have to surf the junk to find a trackball. Yes, I am going to join some PCs together. I just want to keep my microcontroller IOT projects on a exclusive system. Also, to use a Series of HDD and SSD to save my own code. I lost 3 years of code and oh man. I have a bunch of broken incomplete files in the cloud well one drive. Anyway, the trackball looks good. I do appreciate you all SNBForums. You are very nice. Thanks for teaching this old dog a new trick. LOL

You're welcome! Yep, there are a lot of different KVMs out there. One thing to definitely check out to save some cash is used or open box ones.

For a trackball, I would see if you like a thumb or finger based one and go from there. If you end up in the thumb category, the logitech wireless is excellent--my wife used this for years and would actually use it from her thigh standing up, which would be similar to using it on your thigh lying down. If you end up in the finger ball category, you have many, many more choices by different manufacturers so you can check out the designs that seem like they will fit your needs best.

For keeping your IOT projects on an exclusive system and to keep from losing data, I think doing what I do would probably work for you. All of my systems are essentially functionally identical--same os, same portable software, locked down in the same way--even if the hardware is different. And all of my data resides on nas units by different manufacturers, one which is like a primary, and the others are just backups that are updated on a particular day. Each nas can have a second drive so there is protection from drive failure, and because there are multiple units by different manufacturers, even a unit failure will not result in data loss.

The benefit of a distributed computing model like this that any system has access to the data and can perform any role. It also again decreases the chances of data loss since a system failure will not cause data loss, especially when a system crashes and needs to be rebooted since only what that system was working on will be lost.

Another benefit of this methodology is also its scalabilty since you can just add more computers as needed to be able to do more. And taking it to the next level, you can run many virtual machines on a single piece of powerful hardware and scale up and down virtual machines as tasks require.

Hope this gives you some more solutions.