Last time, I gave a background on the toon setup. Now that the toons are sorted out, I'll go into my setup. This is certainly not the way everyone does it, but this works for me.

I use a separate PC for each toon rather than alt/tabbing or having really small windows for the alts. The desk is a corner-style with no hutch, so my three LCD monitors are arranged in a /--\ configuration from left to right primary through tertiary.

The desk has a split deck for monitor/keyboard areas that allows me to lower the kbd/mouse for the primary system and kind of lean a Fang controller board at a 45degree angle just over my F1-F4 keys. That fang controller board is attached to the SECONDARY pc, so I can reach up and use my left hand to hit the action buttons on it independantly of what I'm doing on my main. The Tertiary system is controlled by having a program called KeyClone which sends certain keystrokes (generally only 1-0, -,=,w,s,q,e,`, and . ) that are pressed on the secondary to the tertiary.

That means that whenever I press action button 1 on my secondary toon's pc, it also presses action 1 on my tertiary. By careful combination of macros and occasionally leaving some buttons blank on one or another, I can have an effective if somewhat limited set of common activities set up on my two "slaves".

Each PC has a mouse and keyboard so that I can directly take control if need be, though the tertiary keyboard is a bit awkward to do anything terribly complex with.

I use a program called Synergy which allows me to link up the mouse cursor in such a way that the three systems kind of act as if it was one big triple-monitor system. If I move the mouse (main PC only) off to the right edge, the mouse control passes to the middle pc, and mouse and keyboard movements now apply to that computer... move it off to the right of the second, and the control goes to the third. Synergy has a problem where WOW mouse-look on the second or third goes hyper sensitive and basically just spins, so I have to be careful to only use it for clicking and/or keyboard commands.

Due to the buggy way mouse look works, I never use this to control an alt in combat. If I absolutely need to control an alt directly, I grab its mouse.

Next time: Macros!