Mt. Tiburon Testing Labs

As you know I’m a big advocate of multiple displays: “The more you can see the more you can do.”-Jon Peddie, 1998.

It’s one thing to preach it, it’s another to practice. I’m practicing.

The first step was to attach a second monitor to my shiny new HP nw8240 mobile workstation. What a great machine this is, 1680 x 1050, 15-inch screen powered by an ATI FireGL V5000 that not only runs real apps, but also runs “Splinter Cell Chaos Theory” in all its glory, and it’s got plenty of glory. (Speaking of game glory, have you seen the “F.E.A.R.” demo yet? Crank up your shaders and download it—amazing stuff, but I digress.)

That wasn’t too big a deal in that I do that anytime I give a presentation. But in MTTL we have stuff-some call it a junkyard, some a zoo, others a dump-whatever, we have stuff from various tests and evaluations. And we had a Prince­ton 750 17-inch 1600 x 1200 display. Those are all the right numbers so I hung it on the nw8240 and put it in extended mode. Worked great (small bug on reboot, but we’re working on that).

Figure 1. Four monitors in Jon's zoo. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

It was good, but I wanted more—can’t have too many pixels. So I dusted off the SGI 1600w that was on one of our home-built entertainment PCs. The 1600 was built in 2001 and has a 1600 x 1024 17.3-inch display. It came originally with a digital I/F and SGI later introduced a converter for analog VGA. This is a really sweet monitor and I saw one for sale online for $130.

I hooked it up using a VillageTronic VTbook PCMCIA adapter (http://www.villagetronic.com/) that’s got a Trident controller in it. I know, I know, but guess what? Even over a clunky PCI I/F and with a less than stellar controller, it works damn well. VillageTronic has a new version out that will drive four displays letting you run up to six off your laptop.

So now I had three, but I wanted more, more pixels, I wanted to be able to do more by seeing more (I have noticed, however, that no matter how many pixels I have, this damn keyboard still can’t spell worth a damn-can’t Logi­tech do something about that?)

And then I stumbled across Maxi­Vista (http://www.maxivista.com/). Maxi­Vista is a little software company that can turn your unused laptop or PC into an auxiliary display. It connects via the LAN (your system becomes the server) and uses the screen and graphics controller in the other PC. It’s fabulous, and it’s cheap ($40 for five clients). I immediately hooked up my previous WS laptop, which has 1600 x 1200 res.

FIGURE 2. Four displays in quad setup. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

Think about this for a moment—I could have six displays with a secondary off the machine, and the extended VillageTronic and five more giving me 11, YES! eleven screens-how much more could I do then?

But I didn’t, I stopped with four.

Going for rotation

And yet I wasn’t fulfilled. That is until I remembered the Princeton could rotate, and ATI had HydraVision. Now I had it (see Figure 1)—lots of screen real estate and portrait so I wouldn’t have to scroll through web pages or Word docs.

So now I have a 29.6-Megapixel workspace that is 6080 wide and at one place 1600 tall-we’re talking some serious Seeing here.

The next phase of the experiment was to relocate the old laptop, because its keyboard was in the way. So I opened it as wide as it would go and propped it up behind my main screen (see Figure 2). This is a better viewing configuration. It took me a few tries to get the mouse to track properly, the solution being to stack the fourth display above the main display. At first that didn’t work, but after toggling to extend my desktop, on the fourth display it clicked in.

Mousing in general is awkward, with all this real estate I usually have no clue where the hell that cursor is. XP’s control button doesn’t help much because by the time I scan the screens it’s finished. I did find a nifty 3D-looking cursor at StarDock (http://www.cursorxp.com/), and if you don’t know about StarDock you should check them out. They make great 3D’ish icons and widgets. I don’t know if you can see it or not in the photo, but in the upper left corner of my main screen is a slick-looking analog clock and next to it is a to-do list. This is shareware stuff, not very expensive and very useful (DesktopX 3.1; http://www.wincustomize.com/index.aspx).

One drawback with this much screen space is that I can no longer do a simple screen save. I mean, I can do a screen save, I just can’t get it out of the clipboard-it’s too big for PhotoImpact or Word. 29.6 Mpix at 32 bits/pixel is 117.2 MBytes—that’s a big picture. I also can’t do video overlays anymore. (Editor’s Note: You actually can do screen captures using Jasc’s screen capture utility in Paint Shop Pro. It’s an ancient little piece of technology left over from the DOS age that we can’t do without.)

This setup was easy-thanks to XP’s smart display properties, it made the other three software elements fit together properly. Vista will be even better, and the display controllers are, of course, better. You can get a 17-inch 1280 x 1024 display for as little as $250 today and a 1600 x 1200 version as low as $500. The LCDs use very little desk space, run cool and quiet, and so there really is no good reason not to improve your working environment and productivity. Sounds like a commercial for some monitor company, doesn’t it? But it’s not, it’s just something I believe in.

Well, I gotta go now. My bootleg VM software just came in and I have to load Apple’s OS on my Intel 3.3-GHz Pentium 4 and test it—I wonder if Word will run?

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