Monday, January 15, 2007
Triple & Dual Heads
Thoughts about additional monitorsMy first attempt at getting additional monitors to work with my Dell Dimension 8100 was to try the Triple Head 2 Go from Matrox. Even though their software claimed the TH2G would work with my Dell, it never did! Technical support was worthless! The user forum had some good ideas, unfortunately they also did not work! Now the user forum is no more, Matrox has decided that their lousy support was better than the user forum. An expensive lesson! Now my extra monitors were sitting doing nothing! The biggest obstacle to getting the TH2G working was the inability of the TH2G to work with my KVM switch. My KVM switch controls four computers and the cost to get a KVM that would work with the TH2G would have been casting an additional large sum of money after already spending a significant sum of money!! Not going to happen period!
Fortunately Google came to the rescue again!!! While looking for solutions to my TH2G problems the software sold by MaxiVista showed up on a Google search. Having a laptop with a broken display but otherwise functional it was a simple matter to put Windows XP Pro on the laptop and putting MaxiVista Server Pro on my Dell with the viewer portion of the software on the laptop give me a PERFECT dual headed system! (MaxiVista has a server portion on the primary PC and a viewer portion on the secondary PC.) After a flawless installation, the MaxiVista software worked perfectly without any glitches!!! After the AC adpater failed on the laptop, the MaxiVista viewer software was installed on a desktop computer running Windows XP Pro! Again the software worked perfectly right after the installation! Quite a contrast to the Matrox TH2G that has never worked well! Purchasing a new AC adapter for laptop, put the laptop back to use as the secondary PC; returning the desktop back to its former status.
There are some applications that insist on placing their dialog boxes on the primary display when the application is running with its main windows on the secondary display. This is a very minor irritation since ALL of my major applications work perfectly including Windows XP Pro!! It is truly neat to see digital photo thumbnail spread over two 19" monitors! What a treat!!!
It is truly a pleasure to work with software that just works!!!! MaxiVista is such a pice of software that just does what it claims to do, no more no less!!!
Fortunately Google came to the rescue again!!! While looking for solutions to my TH2G problems the software sold by MaxiVista showed up on a Google search. Having a laptop with a broken display but otherwise functional it was a simple matter to put Windows XP Pro on the laptop and putting MaxiVista Server Pro on my Dell with the viewer portion of the software on the laptop give me a PERFECT dual headed system! (MaxiVista has a server portion on the primary PC and a viewer portion on the secondary PC.) After a flawless installation, the MaxiVista software worked perfectly without any glitches!!! After the AC adpater failed on the laptop, the MaxiVista viewer software was installed on a desktop computer running Windows XP Pro! Again the software worked perfectly right after the installation! Quite a contrast to the Matrox TH2G that has never worked well! Purchasing a new AC adapter for laptop, put the laptop back to use as the secondary PC; returning the desktop back to its former status.
There are some applications that insist on placing their dialog boxes on the primary display when the application is running with its main windows on the secondary display. This is a very minor irritation since ALL of my major applications work perfectly including Windows XP Pro!! It is truly neat to see digital photo thumbnail spread over two 19" monitors! What a treat!!!
It is truly a pleasure to work with software that just works!!!! MaxiVista is such a pice of software that just does what it claims to do, no more no less!!!
