At work with multiple monitors
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https://swinny.net/Computing/-4584-At-work-with-multiple-monitors
If you have an old laptop or desktop computer kicking around, and fancy using it for extending your display real-estate, there are two broad options. You can either extend your main computer's display onto the old computer, or you can control your old computer from your main computer. Which route you take depends on what you're trying to achieve.
Extending your computer's own display
One excellent option for doing this is MaxiVista, with pricing options between $40 and $100. It can even extend your display onto an iPad, although I don't know whether you can simultaneously extend to an iPad and a laptop computer.
Control other computers from your main computer
This is actually akin to a KVM (keyboard-video-mouse) solution, where you use your main computer's keyboard and mouse (but not display) to control your other computers. Each computer therefore runs its own display and operating system (eg, Linux, Mac OS or Windows) that you control from a single keyboard and mouse. This gives is really just a desk space-saver to eliminate multiple input devices, but can also allow sharing of things like the clipboard between computers. One (free) example is Synergy.
Which one, then?
The chances are that you only want to use one computer, and just want it to have more screens. In this case you need to take the first option of extending your computer's display onto other computers. If you specifically need to run different operating systems (eg, a web developer having a Windows OS running for doing Internet Explorer testing) then take the latter (video-mouse sharing) option.