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Add a second monitor without adding a second monitor (continued)
So, how well does this thing work?
I was astounded. First, the system does auto-discovery, so you don't need to set IP addresses or protocols for your laptop to make it work as a second monitor. I just selected "Enable secondary display" from the tray icon and my laptop became an additional monitor. No configuration was involved. It just worked.
I was very skeptical about video performance. I expected to see some serious lag. There was none. Now, to be fair, I've got a very high-end desktop and a 100Base-T network connection between the laptop and my desktop. But a 100Base-T connection is pretty standard for Ethernet and my laptop's just an old 800Mhz chugger, so we're not talking about anything unusual. You're likely to experience similar performance.
Obviously, I wouldn't want to play a first-person shooter videogame on the laptop's extended display. But I wouldn't want to play a first person shooter on the laptop anyway. I did decide to do one cruel test. I dragged a running video clip from my desktop over to the laptop's display to see how it worked.
At first, it didn't. But there was a good reason and it wasn't MaxiVista's fault. Both monitors need to be running at the same video depth. I had one at 16-bit and one at 32-bit. I changed the laptop to 32-bit color quality (again using the Display Properties dialog), and I could drag the video from my main desktop display to MaxiVista's virtual display on the laptop. It ran flawlessly, with not a single dropped frame.
You can go to the MaxiVista site (at http://www.maxivista.com) and download a 30-day trial to see this little wonder for yourself. The product's $49.95, which we think is well worth it, if for no other reason than it restores our faith in magic. We give MaxiVista a mind-blowing 5 out of 5.
OUR RATING: 5 of 5
UltraMon, another useful tool
Once you start to explore the world of multiple monitors, you may find that there are some tweaks that you may want to be able to do more easily. You may want to be able to quickly turn on or off the secondary (or, in my case, tertiary) monitor. We found a wonderful little tool called UltraMon that quickly made itself indispensible.
You may want to easily send a window from one monitor to another, or extend your task bar from monitor to monitor, or even simply have different wallpaper images on each monitor. In fact, as Figure D shows, you can even run a separate screen saver on each monitor.
FIGURE D
 
UltraMon let's you get screensaver-happy! Roll over picture for a larger image.
UltraMon actually does a lot more, but we don't have room in this article to cover everything it does. Suffice it to say, if there's a feature you need for managing multiple monitors, UltraMon's likely to have it. At $39.95, it's a little bit more expensive than we'd like, but we can still give it an indispensable 4 out of 5.
OUR RATING: 4 of 5
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