Saturday 23 January 2010

Sorting out the home office

Today I have been sorting out my home office (second bedroom).  I now have a much bigger, nicer, sturdier desk (old dining table - the new one arrives next week) and I can now put both my desktop monitor and my laptop next to each other.

The excellent Synergy program will let me use the desktop keyboard and mouse with both the desktop and laptop at the same time - but there is a catch.

Both of my computers are running Vista and the catch is this; when running Vista the UAC feature sometimes kicks in when you run an application and Synergy locks up.  The way around this is to modify the Synergy short-cut to run Synergy as an Administrator.  However, as I want Synergy to run automatically when I log in this causes another problem because that will trigger the UAC pop-up.

I do not want to disable UAC but I find this behaviour incredibly annoying.  Fortunately, I have found a workaround.  You can create a scheduled task under Vista which does not run automatically but can be run manually.  This task can be set to run at a high privilege level without UAC kicking in and you can create a short-cut to run this as a command.  Detailed instructions on using scheduled tasks to bypass UAC can be found here.

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