Possible to use additional keyboard and mouse with a virtual machine?

[Garrod]

Hello!

After being the owner of one Mac and having a good lady who needs to use Facebook almost constantly (why?!) I was wondering if it is possible, whilst running a virtual machine in another monitor at fullscreen (Windows XP), if I could attach an additional USB keyboard and mouse to my Mac and use these with the virtual machine whilst at the same time making the virtual machine totally ignore the 'original' Mac mouse and keyboard, therefore enabling us both to use the same Mac (albeit I'll be using Windows XP) at the same time?

Any help would be appreciated!

 

[ilyad]

Hello,

It is possible. In order to proove the capability of Parallels Desktop to do it, we reproduced the issue on our test environment. There are a couple of things to do before you can have that configuration up and running:

1) Disable the smartMouse option in "Virtual machine -> configuration -> options -> Advanced" (turn it off)
2) Enter boot flags for the VM while it is not running:
- Go to "Configuration -> Hardware -> Boot order"
- Enter the flags: "devices.usb.enable_mouse=2;devices.usb.enable_keyboard=2"

Step 2 is not necessary but provides a better performance of the keyboard and mouse

3) Start the virtual machine
4) Connect the mouse and the keyboard to the Mac
5) Go to "Devices -> USB" and choose your keyboard and mouse to assign them directly to the virtual machine.

 

[Garrod]

Thanks ilyad, it works like a charm!

...except! The mouse isn't very fluid: it freezes for a split second every three or so seconds. Is this to be expected?