Great customer service

Plan A was using the second monitor input and a copy of synergy. Unfortunately the analogue input on my LCD screen is rather poor quality and couldn't get synergy to behave reliably in all situations.

Plan B would be a KVM but they are prohibitively expensive when you're using a DVI connection.

Plan C I guess is VNC which works but can be rather sluggish over an 802.11b network.

So I tried out a few X servers - the obvious one is the free Cygwin X server but that is rather unstable and exceptionally slow if you want to be able to cut'n'paste between Windows and an X client. So I eventually ended up with DesktopX 2.0. A cut down version of StarNet X-Win 32 sold by InterOp systems. InterOp are the people behind the Interix kernel as used in Microsoft's Services For Unix and so wanted a cheap X server to accompany SFU. Desktop X was great as it around $100 and you got 3 licenses with it. It ties itself to your hardware configuration (XP product activation style) and so the 3 licenses allow you to reinstall after upgrading or changing your system. They also say they don't mind you using the licenses simultaneously for other machines - just bear in mind that it reduces your upgrade ability.

So anyway I bought a copy and installed it on my desktop and laptop, and then used the third copy after upgrading to my new portable. All great until a couple of days ago when I plugged in a USB hard drive to my desktop and the X server refused to run demanding a new license. Since the configuration of my machine hasn't changed other than assorted USB devices being plugged in and removed I was a bit annoyed at this so I emailed InterOp. I wasn't very hopeful of a result since they've discontinued DesktopX - now they sell a cutdown version of the Hummingbird X server which can only be used for local connections. However I had a reply back in a few hours with a new license code good for 3 more registrations.

What a nice company.