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iBook with monitor spanning, not just mirroring

C

Classic

macrumors regular
Original poster
FOr all of you enterprising iBook 700 MHz owners out there like Blakespot, check this out:

http://www.powerpage.org/story.lasso?newsID=9606

Apparantly, the ATI Mobility Radeon chip inside the iBooks supports monitor spanning, and Apple has limited the iBook's functionality to keep a greater separation between the iBooks and TiBooks. If you check ut ATI's site, you can see that the chip clearly supports dual monitors...

http://www.ati.com/technology/hardware/mobilityradeon/features.html

Also, if you check out the specs on older TiBooks (the first with gigabit ethernet runningg at 500/667 MHz) you will notice that they also had ATI Mobility Radeon chips. So, if they supported monitor spanning, one would think that this is inherently possible with the 700MHz iBooks.

http://www.apple-history.com/pg4_giga.html

Some guy in Germany transfered his hard drive contents from an older TiBook to an iBook, and discovered thi by accident.

Anybody out there want to give it a try?
 
Update on iBook with monitor spanning

Powerpage.org has posted an update to the aforementioned work around to get 700MHz ibooks to span two monitors.

If anybody is interested in trying this, check out http://macparts.de/ibook and report back here to let s know your experience.
 
Works on iBook 800

My brand new iBook 800 just arrived this morning. After getting a few things installed (but not my new RAM yet - need to go and buy a really small screwdriver) I decided to have a go at the OF hack posted above. I was a little scared, but it all worked first time. I am now typing this on my nice 19" monitor in spanning mode (CTX pr960f). For some reason my preferred mode (1600x1200 @ 80Hz) is not available. Currently running at 1280x1024 @ 75 Hz, highest available resolution (which I tried) is 1920x1440 @ 60Hz. Seemed a little slower at max resolution, but I only have 128Mb of RAM in at the moment. Once I have the additional 512Mb in I imagine that this will fly. If only Apple would turn this on by default!
 
sounds great

I have an iBook 500 and the only complaint I have is it's 8mb outdated video card. I'm so glad that the 32mb 7500 in them is substantial! It does suck that this isn't turned on by default, but the capabilities are in the hardware none the less.

How do you run an external monitor higher than the 1024x768 that the iBook is set to?
 
With spanning turned on the montor control pannel becomes like the powerbook one. When you have an external monitor connected and you open the displays preference panel you get an additional window on the external display. You can then set the resolution for each display independantly. You can also set the relative positions of the displays so as when you drag a window off one screen it appears in the correct place on the other. All very cool.
 
Go to www.xlr8yourmac.com for more info on some of the people who did this. Be aware that it doesn't always work on the older models, but if you have one of the models just introduced (16 or 32 MB) you should be fine.

It's actually pretty easy considering.
 
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