New - not sure if Dualboxing is what I need

[Apps]

Walmart sells an Acer thats sub $400 i3, 6GB ram, and will handle running a copy of wow no problem.

http://www.walmart.com/ip/Acer-Mesh-...142050&veh=dat

Itll get the job done for your GF to play with you. However, if this is a young couple, and not likely your next or first wife material, buying her a laptop probably isnt a wise choice out of investment return.

[MiRai]

Walmart sells an Acer thats sub $400 i3, 6GB ram, and will handle running a copy of wow no problem.

Walmart sells an Acer thats sub $400

Walmart sells an Acer

Walmart sells

Walmart

The less things we, as consumers, buy from Walmart, the better the future looks. =)

Just figured I would throw this in here.

[Madadd]

Apps: new gf, unsure of future plans/longevity, can't afford to buy a new PC outright for her, and she wouldn't buy new one just to play. Besides, if I can make this work with current hardware, why bother spending for a second PC?

Homer: It requires 3rd party software to use multiple mice/keyboard...Windows does recognize the different mice (different drivers and such. this may not be possible if using the same model of mouse), but it only allows one focus, which means only one cursor. The 3rd party programs use a form of virtual desktop and setup to separate out the 2 mice (during setup it will ask you to left click the mouse using screen 1, press alt+alt on keyboard 1, etc).

At least that's how I understand it all.

[luxlunae]

You could sort of do this through a multiboxing approach. Say one of you sits on the left and runs the "active" character with the mouse to move and the numpad to control abilities, and then use isboxer or AHK or whatever to pass WASD and 1-= to the second instance.

Not a comfortable way to game together though, by any means. Just tell her to buy her own laptop or get her a cheap one off craigslist.

Was this changed in the past half decade or so? I remember in school crawling under desks in IT to plug a second mouse into my friends computer to fuck with him. They both would work.

They both work, but they fight for control of the same cursor, this guy wants separate mice for both of them.

[Madadd]

It worked!

I plugged in the second keyboard and mouse into any old usb ports, extended the desktop to the second screen, installed, restarted and went through the very brief keyboard/mouse setup. Viola. At first all sound was coming through my speakers. I switched the audio between the tv and speakers a couple times and messed around in the softxpand settings (I really didn't think I did anything of consequence in here) and got the audio to come out in the appropriate place for each client. So user 1 on the desktop got audio through the speakers, user 2 on the tv got audio through the tv. Performance wise, I did not notice ANY difference with my setup. I did not overclock (still at stock clocks and timings). All in all it was a rather easy setup.

Notes:
We had trouble signing in under the same user at the windows login (go figure). Easy workaround, just create a new user/guest account.
Need to copy the game files to either a different location on one of the clients. Not sure if it's just another folder or you need to put it on a whole other HDD. I did the latter.
For this particular game (maybe all games, idk), one of the clients will need to create a shortcut of the diablo.exe file and add -launcher to the end of the target field.
Sometimes on client 1, when using the diablo launcher it would startup on client 2's screen, and sometimes Vice-a-versa. Doing the above on both clients will remedy that.

The one problem I still have is occasionally client 2 will black screen and after a minute the windows login will come up as if it just restarted. When trying to re-enter the game, the shortcut that was created pointing to the copied game .exe gave me an error (i don't remember what) and had to be re-created. I don't know why, but I'll be looking into it today.

Edit: It seems like the trial version of softxpand: " (all workstations will automatically logoff from SoftXpand every 1 hr)" Which seems about right, timing wise...Although it sounds like all clients would be logged out, but Client 1 was unaffected by this. I still don't know if this is the real error...I'll probably go ahead and buy it tonight and I'll update on this issue tomorrow. Also it doesn't explain the shortcut suddenly not working.