Noob who could use a few tips ><

Hey, I just came across this website today and I thought it was really helpful.

Basically, I'm a complete noob when it comes to dual-boxing; I just started a few days ago and I'm looking for some help with a few things.

My setup right now consists of a laptop, a computer, a wireless keyboard/mouse (two receivers) and a G15 keyboard and another wired Logitech mouse.

Here's a picture:
http://img169.imageshack.us/img169/7715/mvc03kv5.jpg

Right now I'm trying to level up two mages at the same time and I could really use help with a few things.

I don't want to ask too many questions, but my main question is, how should I be playing? Should I be using my wireless keyboard and my wireless mouse to control both instances? Or should I unbind movement keys on my second character and just make my second character /follow my main character while I still use the wireless keyboard? Or do both of those sound completely stupid?

Also, is there another way I should set up everything or will what I'm currently using work? Is there any other hardware I should invest in that would help me out? Any software I should be using?

Anyways, that's all I could think of to ask, any tips will really be appreciated, like I said I'm completely new to dual-boxing so I can use all the help I can get :)

I'm just starting out as well, but hopefully I can answer a question or two.

My setup is two computers, one mouse, and one keyboard. Micah posted a link to the multibox software he created, and I would highly recommend going that route instead.

With the multibox software, the two computer screens pretty much become a single screen in terms of mouse movement (moving the mouse to the edge of one makes it seemlessly appear on the associated edge of the other), and the keyboard input is redirected to whatever computer the mouse is currently on. You can also (via keybinding) change the software so that all keyboard and/or mouse input is sent to both computers.

In my case, I have just started with 2 mages. On my secondary mage, all spells are macroed so the toon first picks up the primary target before casting, and the movement keys are unbound. I have the keyboard in broadcast mode (i.e. pressing '2' sends '2' to both computers) but the mouse only sending input to my main computer. My secondary toon just follows the main guy around.

Not sure I actually helped you with your questions, but that describes my setup at least.

Yeah that helped, thanks, I was kind of confused on how I should go about setting up my keyboard and stuff so it's always nice to see how other people do it.

I tried using Synergy but for some reason my monitors couldn't detect each other so I just uninstalled it; I'll look around for the one Micah posted, hopefully that one helps :)

Edit: I got Micah's program to work, works really well too :)

Only thing is, I'm wondering now, do I even need these wireless keyboards anymore since this program can broadcast everything to both PC's? If not I'm going to take them back and maybe buy a new monitor or 2 Nostromo Gamepads since I think those could help if I need to micro manage each character.

Glad you found the site helpful :) here to build a community~

As for your playstyle, it's all about what fits you best. I'd try out as many different options as you think are viable to how you play (check out the hardware/software section) and see which one works for you (without spending anymore money than you have already invested of course). From the looks of it, seems you can broadcast keystrokes using the wireless keyboard so you have a lot of options to experiment with.

For anything in the realm of playing more than 1 character at the same time, it's all a learning curve. To be honest, I wasn't that good playing 2 mages until I finally hit 60 with them and pvp'd a bit. Hope this helps as well :)

I'm doing it a bit differently, specially since I'm using Linux.

My setup is a dual monitor machine with 2 cores and 2GB of ram memory, and my setup basically makes each WoW instance thinks it's allways running alone in the foreground (elsewhere I have problems with the input focus when dual boxing).

I'm using a pair of self-made control programs:

- The first one send the mouse movements among both WoW instances and send keypresses and button clicks to only one of them, alternating among them with either a keypress (currently left windows key) or by moving the mouse through the left side of the screen.
- The second one let me program each of the extra keys on my G15 keyboard (and on the second and third keyboards I have on my machine) to send keypresses to specific windows. Although I'm currently just using it to bind the G-keys to the actionbar of the second account it's flexible enough to send different key sequences to each window and differentiate between keypress and keyrelease.

I have not yet made any in-game macros beyound putting a target in front of each ability.

(Unfortunately I'm not able to dual box right now, my motherboard is KIA and my second computer is not able to run two WoW instances.)

As an after tought, the one think I think could be a godsend to dual boxing, if it can be made to work properly with multiple monitors, is using a Wii remote. It should be much easier to change monitors with it, and the combination of button presses with gesture recognition could make it possible to send quite complex commands with it. I'm thinking about doing some experimentations, but only in march.