Picture in Picture (PIP)

Can octopus be configured to do PIP across two computers? If so, how?

If not, is there a freeware program that will?

Yes and no. There is no possible way to transfer a session from PC2 to PC1 or vice versa. That's a limitation on modern home gaming PCs, not multiboxing software.

If you mean having PiP work on two different PCs, like flipping sessions around between PC2's WoWs and also flipping sessions around between PC1's WoWs, yes, I do this all the time.

I'm not sure I understand.

I just want to be able to close my laptop lid and still be able to see the laptop's screen in a small box on top of my desktop. I have no problem still moving my mouse over the edge of the desktop's screen to access the laptop like I do now.

In order to do this you need to capture video of the window(s) on the laptop and stream it across your network to the other PC. You need to use a video streaming program for this. For example:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/win.../prodinfo.aspx

At best, I think this will be difficult to set up and performance will probably be poor.

Edit: Remote-desktop (RDP) software is another possibility.

Another possibility might be to live-broadcast the laptop screen over the web using a service like www.justin.tv. I think Moorea (a forum member here) is doing this with WoW. Maybe you could broadcast the laptop screen and watch the results in a browser pop-up on the desktop machine. I have no idea what the latency or frame rate would be or how much it would bog down the laptop. Maybe you would need to buy a screen capture card to get decent performance.

Moorea's broadcast:

http://www.justin.tv/mooreatv/old