I am remodeling my basement and it will have a flat panel TV on the wall. There are 4 computers throughout my home (upstairs and downstairs). I would like to be able to access any of them from the basement and use the flat panel on the wall as the monitor. Is there some kind of program or piece of hardware that would allow me to do this? Right now I occasionally use my 46″ Samsung flat panel as a monitor for my MacBook. I would think I would have to hook the MacBook up to the TV in the basement then access the other computers thru it… I don’t want to have to run cables all thru the house to do this. I have an Airport Extreme router and want to use that to do it… Any networking gurus please advise. Thanx!
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2 responses so far ↓
1 Tracy L // Sep 28, 2008
I would just put RealVNC on them (there are Mac, Linux, and PC versions) and use that to "remote desktop" onto the other machines. (Your main machine would then display the other machine on the big monitor.)
Simple easy and cheap. It does run over the network this way.
Otherwise you will need to use a very complex KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) switch and cables that really wouldn't work for machines that are more than 20' away.
Oh forgot the link
http://realvnc.com/
2 johntrottier // Sep 28, 2008
Depending on your choices you may need more than one piece of hardware to do all you want to do.
The router will be the controller of the network you will connect your computers together with. Using a router will let any computer access the internet and share files with another machine
To be able to remotely control remote machines and see them on your basement monitor, there are 2 approaches you can take
Software - assuming you have one computer in the basement and it is connected to the big screen, you can use any of the VNC programs like TightVNC or UltraVNC to take control of and see the desktops of the remote machines. You load the VNC server on the remote machines and use the VNC viewer to access them. The price - Free
Hardware - If all the computers are elsewhere - Black Box (http://www.blackbox.com/) makes a wide variety of KVM (Keyboard Video Mouse) switches. You can purchase the KVM switches to give you direct control of each machine from the basement. When you are done setting this up, you will have hardware access and control of all the remote machine. The price? somewhere between OUCH!! and BOING!
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