Swordie Bloggie

A friend was asking me the other day if there are possibilities to use multiple monitors on his notebook. I said sure… use a VGA splitter or Video splitter.

But that’s not what he wanted… he wants to display different section of the display on different monitor… duhh…

Well I told him that his notebook already has one VGA port to connect to a bigger monitor.

But no… he wants to use two external monitor… so the setup will be with 3 LCD displays… the notebook LCD screen and two external monitors…

emm… lucky, I’ve seen a device before which can do exactly what he wanted to do… the device is simply called as USB UXGA Adapter by the computer shops… 😛

What exactly is USB 2.0 UXGA Adapter?

Well, it is an external video card or you can also call it as external display card… The adapter, a small electronic box which has an USB port and VGA or DVI or both ports.  To use the video cards adapter, you simply plug in the USB cable from the notebook to one end of the adapter. On the other end of the adapter, connect the monitor’s VGA or DVI cable.

If the adapter’s driver is properly installed, the operating system like Windows should be able to detect the adapter and use it as secondary monitor… or third monitor… the first is the notebook LCD monitor, second is the monitor connected to the VGA port on the notebook and the third is the monitor connected to the USB UXGA Adapter.

You can install up to 6 USB UXGA adapters at one time… provided you have 6 USB 2.0 ports available. And all 6 external monitors should be able to display UXGA resolution at 1600×1200… wow… :O

Today, our private or personal digital data are so huge that it can reach hundreds of gigabytes. But lucky for us, today we have many types of external storage and come in many sizes… sizes in term of storage capacity and physical or footprint size.

A couple of years ago, owning a 256MB thumb or USB drive is considered luxurious. But today that size is considered ‘dinosaur’. 16GB of thumb drive is so common today… just like the 16GB Kingston Data Traveler which replaced my 8GB PenDrive SLIQ. And although the storage size is huge, the read and write access speed is better and faster than before. The price also has gone down so much that they are no longer considered luxurious item, everyone have at least one of it.

And if you need larger storage, there is always an alternative. You can use the external hard drive which can reach in terabytes of storage. My less than two years old 2.5” Western Digital My Passport external hard drive with 250GB of storage is no longer enough… used about 80% for storing digital photo alone. Storage is easily exhausted if you own a digital camera. With today’s camera with at least 8 megapixels of resolutions, you will require a lot of storage than you expect. But alternatively there are 500GB or more external hard drive which are available everywhere today.

But what I’m interested today is the small footprint external storage system with RAID and eSATA. But I’m not interested with the usual RAID 0 or 1, but RAID 5. And with eSATA, data will fly between your PC and external storage. Using USB 2.0 for huge data transfer is almost suicidal, you will swear at your PC and external storage, trust me…

eSATA should be the answer for today’s huge external data storage… well network will do too but eSATA is quite common in most motherboard today. But what disappointment me most is the lack of eSATA support on notebook. Well it is available, but only in large size notebook for now…