I bought a 19 inch flat-panel monitor this afternoon. Well, two actually, but only one is for me, the other is one is for M. Both our current (CRT, 19 inch also) monitors are showing signs of age, the colour/brightness is fading, occasional hiccups, so we felt it was time to replace them.
Now of course I couldn’t help myself and started daydreaming about having a dual-monitor setup with the old and the new monitor side-by-side. Unfortunately with only one DVI connector on the machine, that is not directly possible.
I thought I saw a solution in something called a DVI splitter, but that’s not quite what I need. These things duplicate the signal while I want it distributed over the outputs. Just for completeness I’ll list a few:
- Startech 2-Port DVI Video Splitter ($199). Maximum resolution 1600×1200 @ 60 Hz.
- Gefen 1×2 DVI Splitter ($299). Maximum resolution 1920×1200
Aside from the possible price obstacle and not being what I wanted anyway, you’ll need DVI-VGA adapters if you have non-DVI monitors in your mix, as I do.
Two actual solutions now:
- Matrox has a dualhead2go (and a triplehead2go if you have even more spare monitors). This can get you a 2560×1024 pseudo-display (the OS only sees one monitor). Matrox puts the price-tag at $250 but I’ve seen it for sale at $156.
- Belkin has the OmniView SOHO Series 2-Port KVM. that claims to support up to 2048×1536 @ 85Hz. Belkin’s website puts the price-tag at $245 but I see it for sale for $130. Downside seems to be that you need to buy some cables to actually hook up your monitors.
I’d love to hear about alternative/better/cheaper solutions, of course.
A week ago I ordered an adapter gadget to hook up ATA/SATA of both 2.5 and 3.5 inches as USB storage devices. Today I received it, so I started to take apart the broken laptop and try it on the harddisk and CD/DVD-drive in there, to find out how salvagable those two would be.