I read the post that the intention was to  run one laptop from another laptop.  There  are some good solutions mentioned already, but I figured I would add a few more building on what has been said. 

Most monitors have more than one display input.  Like a 2 hdmi or 1 hdmi and 1 vga.  You can easily get  adapters to help if the laptop does not have a matching output. You can toggle between displays using the monitor's menu and sometimes using a hotkey in conjunction with a utility provided by the monitor manufacturer. I think some LG monitors  have this kind of utilities.  A few newer monitors have a usb switch built usb switch, but you can also buy one really cheap.  ( I think someone else mentioned the usb switch in the thread) This mimics the kvm.  Kvms are pretty cheap nowadays.

As an aside, Windows 10 also provides the ability to Project a screen on another windows 10 system on the network. This could help if you were trying to run both laptops from one of the laptops.  How to use screen mirroring on Windows 10 to turn your PC into a wireless display

I know a few people who  use the project screen instead of something like anydesk or ultravnc.

So I decided to try out xyplorer because it seems powerful enough and because of the licensing.  My hope is that by using it I will get a baseline to compare. 

One thing that stuck out to me in the comparison was the undo feature.  Being able to undo over 250 file operations :) I hope I never need to test that.

Not advocating DOpus one way or the other, (I've used it since my old Amiga days), just answering the various points.
.....
I doubt whether I use even 20% of what DOpus is capable of but I'm comfortable with it and I'm happy to support the developer.

-4wd (February 04, 2021, 05:54 AM)

@4wd
thank you very much. I've been going through and exploring the list of plug-ins you have linked to. I have just begun. It certainly looks like it will do everything I need. I'm a little bit hesitant to purchase it as I will be getting a new PC soon. But I see I can get a portable version for $10.

In many regards right now the most important feature I'm looking for is the retain/preserve data creation date when copying files from one folder to another. I need to consolidate files from a number of external hard drives spanning back to 2005.

Thank you again. I'll continue to go through the links