dual sreens?!

[IceBoy]

Hi All,

Went to an office today where lots of staff had smallish laptops but additional LCD screens as well.

They were able to use the second screen as additional desktop space and drag and drop things as necessary.

Anyway this got me thinking....can I do this at home with my 18month old Dell laptop. It does have a monitor out socket?

How is this done, do I need dual graphics card or some other fancy hardware?

Help much appreciated.

IceBoy

[sinizter]

Almost all laptops made in the last 3 years will be capable of this. It will most likely have a VGA output.

Connect another screen and use the windows display settings to set it to mirror or display two separate screens.

Programs like UltraMon will make the setup a lot more configurable, but basic windows capability is sufficient for most things.

[rpguk]

Should work without anything else. Just plug your monitor into the VGA socket on your laptop. There should be an icon above one of the F1 - F12 keys at the top of your keyboard which looks like two monitors, if the second monitor isn't recognised right away then press the 'fn' key on your laptop and that key I mentioned.

If it still doesn't work, right click your desktop and choose graphic properties. Play around with the settings there and you should get it configured.

[IceBoy]

Thanks.
IceBoy

[Man-At-Arms]

sinizter said:

Almost all laptops made in the last 3 years will be capable of this.

even longer

i used to have an old Tossiba Satellite lappy (Pentium II @ 300MHz i think) with Win98

did loads of presentations with a digital projector attached to the vga port

Edited by Man-At-Arms on Tuesday 2nd February 18:50

[Muzzlehatch]

I have a 4 year old Sony laptop, and it has no problems with it. In fact everyone in our office has dual screens.

[CobolMan]

I find It's a real boon to productivity.

[bitwrx]

CobolMan said:

I find It's a real boon to productivity.

Yep saves loads of time not having to alt-TAB between $(something useful) and PH!