I’ve been playing around with a copy of MaxiVista, the software that lets you use another machine as a second monitor (usually a spare laptop, although there’s nothing stopping you from using it on any machine with a display). In a nutshell, it works and works well.
Read my impressions after the jump.
I downloaded the software from MaxiVista’s site, generated a client and copied to my target machine (a laptop driving an LCD projector). After running the client software, Windows recognized I had a second display and stretched my desktop just as it would with any other monitor. I then ran the client on another machine and it switched over to that one without issue, disabling the laptop/projector screen. I was able to switch back and forth to the different ‘monitors’ only by deactivating and reactivating the client, which was sort of lame. I understand that MaxiVista only supports one client monitor at a time, but it’d be nice to be able to switch heads from the source machine.
The display refresh rate seemed very fast. Not true monitor fast, there was some stutter here and there when moving windows around, but definitely usable fast (this was over a wired commodity 100Mbit network, by the way). I even dragged an instance of Windows Media Player over to the second monitor and it continued playing the video without a hitch. I couldn’t get PowerDVD to work, unfortunately, although I suspect that may have something more to do with PowerDVD’s need (longing!) to fully possess the secondary monitor it is on. I didn’t bother trying another DVD player, because I am lazy, but if you could get full screen DVD movies to play over the network connection, that would be pretty impressive. For the normal secondary-monitor uses like web browsing and email, it’s more than capable.
CPU usage was reasonable, idling around 1 percent or so, with spikes up to 14 percent when I was thrashing around a bit (Athlon XP 3200 Barton, 1GB RAM). The network traffic seemed fairly reasonable, too, although I’ll admit my measurements may be sort of suspect, as I started to do some real honest-to-goodness benchmarking before realizing that I could just write “it seems fairly reasonable” then spend all my benchmarking time playing games. Windows’ network monitoring panel in the Task Manager showed about 14% network use, for what it’s worth.
In general, I like MaxiVista a lot, if mainly because it finally gives me something to tell all those people who ask me what they can do with old laptops (because of the way the LCD panels in laptops connect to the video hardware, there really isn’t a practical way to extract and reuse them). In fact, I’d almost recommend it, but I have a couple of serious, but subjective caveats. Mainly, I think it’s too expensive. I didn’t pay anything for it, of course, because I’m a hot shot internet technology journalist, but paying $50 for a single license seems like a lot of scratch for what is primarily software that appeals to those looking to save a little money by resuscitating old hardware. My other beef is that MaxiVista only supports one additional ‘monitor’ at a time. I’m sure that the sort of on-the-fly screen compression that MaxiVista is doing doesn’t scale proportionately (from a CPU perspective) as you add more monitors, but I’d like the ability to give it a shot, even if it brings my machine to its knees. If I could manage to turn two laptops into secondary monitors instead of one, then MaxiVista’s $50 price tag starts sounding more like a bargain.
Read [MaxiVista]
