[Closed] 2 PCs, 1 user setup?

Keeping them in sync how?

use a microsoft account to log in and set the accounts to sync? Other than that I think you just need to install the programs yourself and save all of your files to one drive. Just search for 'sync settings' on your computer

I'm not exactly sure how much is synced but I know that a lot of settings follow me from one computer to another

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows-8/sync-settings-pcs

No idea if that will work by the way.

The biggest problem I can think of, off the top of my head is application updates. I use about 10 programs, all of which need to be kept up to date, and unfortunately, each seems to update about every two weeks. This alone takes best part of an hour to do.

Then there's the desktop, I keep lots of temporary shortcuts on it. Though perhaps MS sync can help with that.

Sounds like you just need one machine!

CP, that would be ideal, but not doable. Desktop is powerful, quiet, and used day to day. Take the laptop when I travel, its not as fast, much noisier, but just about copes when I can't have access to the desktop.

Log into the desktop remotely?

Not your user case, but Adobe do Cloud synchronisation so I can log onto two different computers using the same account and all the settings remain identical. And we use Dropbox so always work on that (no files are stored locally).

If I bin a computer it takes about 30 minutes to set-up a new one to be almost identical.

So it can be done

Then there's the desktop, I keep lots of temporary shortcuts on it. Though perhaps MS sync can help with that.

I'd have thought you could do it with MS sync - or you could just use your One Drive and set c:\users\UrbanHiker\Desktop to be one of the synchronised folders.

Thats and interesting idea mol, wonder how well it would work.

Win 8.1 user syncing with a MS account and using Onedrive will work up to a point for your user files/documents. Unfortunately you will have to live with the installed applications needing to be updated on both machines - even if you placed the app binaries in a folder that was synced there would be no way to easily guarantee that required registry updates would be made to both machines.

If you can access the desktop remotely from the laptop then you leave some applications just installed there.

i think that would depend on what the shortcuts are?
not much point syncing a shortcut to another machine if it points at something local (user file or program etc.) that's not synced.

syncing user files is easy. syncing installed programs - thought that was the main reason for Windows 8 / Winphone 8 / Surface, but I guess that feature might be mre of a Windows 9 thing?

You can probably set apps that you buy from the window store to automatically download to any PC you log into but the apps would still need to update their binaries separately - it would likely just do it in the background like Office installed under O365 seems to.

I haven't bought any desktop apps from the store so I can't actually confirm that.

From personal experience I have found the OneDrive documents sync between multiple machines to be flakey at the best of times - Dropbox has been far more reliable.