Imagine this. Imagine you could turn on your laptop and sit it down next to your desktop's monitor. But let's take it one step further. Imagine your laptop could become part of your desktop computer's desktop, just like that second monitor. Then, you'd be able to drag those toolbars and palettes from your main monitor over to your laptop's screen. You'd have the extra working space, and your laptop would once again feel the love.

Imagine if your laptop could magically become your second monitor with a mere snap of the fingers, a flick of the wrist. That'd be some serious magic, wouldn't it?

Ah, but old Art Clarke was right. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And that, patient reader, brings us back to MaxiVista.

The miracle of MaxiVista
MaxiVista does just that. It allows the monitor on one computer to act as a secondary monitor on another. You can see this demonstrated in Figure A.

FIGURE A

MaxiVista makes a second PC act like a second monitor.

By the way, as a rule, ZATZ publications don't use animated graphics as figures in articles. This concept's so cool, we decided to make an exception and use an animation to help demonstrate what we're talking about.

Other than a network connection between the two computers, there's no special hardware required. MaxiVista adds a new video card driver into your system. What's interesting about this video card driver is that Windows is completely convinced you've got another video card. But what you've got is a network connection. Take a look at Figure B.

FIGURE B

Monitor 3 is the MaxiVista virtual video card. Click picture for a larger image.

Let's look at this screenshot carefully. As I mentioned, I've got two physical monitors in my desktop computer. In the Display Properties box, they're indicated by the big "1" and "2" boxes. When I installed MaxiVista, the box labeled "3" became available, indicating I had a third monitor installed. This wasn't really a third monitor -- it was my laptop!

Also, notice in the Display Properties box that the display is listed as a Maxi_Vista_DriverA. This is normally where you'd see the name of a video card. And, finally, notice that I've got "Extend my Windows desktop onto this monitor" checked. This tells windows that I'd want to, ah, extend my Windows desktop onto this monitor.

In other words, as far as Windows is concerned, it is another monitor. Windows has no idea that I'm really connecting to my laptop over the network.

MaxiVista installs a tray icon, which gives you some simple controls, including enabling or disabling the extended monitor capability. This is important, because when you want your laptop to function as a laptop, you want to turn off the magic and go back to using your laptop's display with your laptop.

As Figure C shows, there are a bunch of other options available for how you use the secondary computer as a monitor.

FIGURE C

You can adjust a variety of options. Click picture for a larger image.

There's one more thing you need to do to make all this work. You need to install a very tiny client application on your laptop or secondary computer. All you need to do is set it to autorun when you boot up, and you can basically forget it.