dual monitors from macbook!

[whyrichard]

hello good observent obsessive mac people,


thumbing through a pc mag a few monthes ago i came across a product of interest.


there was this box and it worked like this:
...you would plug your laptops monitor into it, and then plug two monitors into it, and it would give you an extended desktop across two monitors...

i think that it tricked the laptop into thinking that you had one monitor of 3200x1200 as an external monitor, and you would use it in mirror mode. (assuming your video card could drive it, and a macbook theoretically could)


any takers?

what product was this?

thanks,
r.

[whyrichard]

http://www.pcstats.com/artvnl.cfm?articleID=1884

http://www.matrox.com/graphics/offhome/gxm.cfm


thanks myself!

would be awesome... but no support for apple/mac? (intels? xp on mac?) and not enough resolution for 3400x1200 (my two 21" monitors)


it is such a hard world...


r.

[Chundles]

It's called "Sidecar" I think. It fits into the PCMCIA slot on the PowerBook. I don't think there's one yet that works for the ExpressCard/34 slot on the MacBook Pro but then it's only really a matter of time.

The ExpressCard/34 slot allows full access to the PCIe bus and could therefore support better graphics capabilities. Don't know if they could fit one into the 34mm wide form factor of the MBP's ExpressCard slot. There could be some good ones for the 54mm version although the MBP doesn't have that type of slot. Might be an addition to the 17" MacBook Pro if one does eventuate.

[whyrichard]

saw sidecar already. solutions are the price of another computer! sillytalk.

[ahunter3]

Big deal.

I take my PowerBook G4, I plug my VillageTronic VTBook (http://www.villagetronic.com/e_pr_vtbook.html) card into the CardBus slot, and I attach one external monitor to that and the other external monitor to the standard DVI-out port that all modern PowerBooks come with.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but I can certainly run a pair of 20" monitors at reasonably high refresh rates and resolutions while displaying 1680 x 1050 pixels on the built-in laptop screen.

It's true that a PC laptop can run two external monitors from one CardBus device alone, but that's largely because they often have lousy external-monitor support out-of-the-box, which is not true of Mac PowerBooks.

[whyrichard]

fascinating.


thanks,
r.

[ahunter3]

http://home.earthlink.net/~ahunter03/Stuff/TripleMonG4PB.jpg
http://home.earthlink.net/~ahunter03/Stuff/DesktopScreenShot.jpg