More Displays the Merrier

If you own or maintain an old notebook and you look at dual-displayed computers with envy, then Village Tronic has the solution for you!

In a business environment, sometimes one display is not enough. Luckily most notebooks today have a second port which you can connect another display. But what if you wanted a 3rd display or more? What if your laptop doesn’t even have a VGA port? Village Tronic has a solution called the VTBook which offers up to two additional displays to be attached to your notebook using a the CardBus expansion slot.

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Unlike some other mobile video expansion products on the market currently, the VTBook does not require any additional power or special devices. The VTBook plugs directly into the notebook’s CardBus slot and you attach your display directly to the VTBook. The model we are testing is a single display model, but you can get a dual-display version if you need it.

Installation of the VTBook

Installation of the VT Book is very straight-forward: plug in the card, run the Setup program included on the CD, and reboot. That’s it! Upon rebooting, any display attached to the VTBook will be identified and will appear in your Display Properties panel. You can then adjust the spanning and resolution as you see fit.

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VTBook appears like any other display adapter.

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The VTBook installed and running.


Software

Once installed, the VTBook has a utility called VT Gauge which acts as a control panel for the card. In that tool you can see the current temperature of the card (it gets pretty warm!), set power options, configure how the VTBook reacts during boot-up, and what interface to use (DVI or VGA). Though under the Power Level setting you can enable 2D and 3D acceleration, the VT Book and the Card Bus just does not have the bandwidth to do any sort of 3D well.

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The VT Book comes with software called VT MultiDisplay which is a VT branded version of UltraMon, a multi-display windowing tool. Using VT MultiDisplay, you can quickly make windows span across all displays, or quickly send a window from one screen to the other without having to drag windows around.

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Another neat feature about VT MultiDisplay is that the Windows task bar spans both windows and displays running tasks in each respective screen.

There are many more options to play with in VT MultiDisplay. The software really does make using multiple displays a lot more efficient.

Next Page – Software and Battery

 

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