Double Screen on Laptop

Ok guys so the screen on my IBM Thinkpad r61 just isn't doing it. Is it possible to use my pc screen as a second second screen? The complicated part is that if I disconnect the laptop to take around the house I would want the PC to run on its own. Is this possible? BTW right the PC screen is connected to a pc.

While typical laptop PCs can run on either external or internal monitors, and can even switch between them automatically if put into docking stations, typical laptops do not have dual video ouuput capability to drive two monitors simultaneously.

My Toshiba laptop (Windows 7, Nvidia Geforce 310M) does it easily. When I connect my external monitor and right-click on the desktop and select 'Screen Resolution', I then have the option of selecting display on 1 (the laptop), display on 2 (the external), identical display on both or extended display on both, which splits the desktop between the two. Also, because the laptop is connected to the external's DVI socket and my PC is connected to its VGA socket, I can easily toggle the monitor between inputs.

tzalman wrote in post #12327259
My Toshiba laptop (Windows 7, Nvidia Geforce 310M) does it easily. When I connect my external monitor and right-click on the desktop and select 'Screen Resolution', I then have the option of selecting display on 1 (the laptop), display on 2 (the external), identical display on both or extended display on both, which splits the desktop between the two. Also, because the laptop is connected to the external's DVI socket and my PC is connected to its VGA socket, I can easily toggle the monitor between inputs.

Dual port video output capabilities exist in your Toshiba, which accounts for your capabilities.

In contrast to what you can do...Years ago, I worked for a company which provided Toshiba laptops to workers. I opted to buy my own IBM Thinkpad, because I wanted the lighter weight and slimmer capabilities so I would be less burdened during the considerable international air travel that I was doing. On my Thinkpad I could simultanously drive the Thinkpad LCD and also an external monitor/projector, even while displaying videos on screen; the Toshibas used by the company were forced to choose only External while displaying vides, and could not drive both internal and external at the same time. So not all Toshibas could do what you can do.

the only thing is that your screen might suffer from two different color contrast and quality it renders, meaning one shows saturated and the others might not but then that also depends on the monitor that you will buy.

Doesn't this depend on the graphics card in the laptop and not the brand?

It appears that your r61 has the Intel integrated graphics, and I'm not sure how nicely those play with external monitors. I do know that most dedicated graphics cards (ones from Nvidia and ATI) usually support external monitors. I would look up the Intel graphics in your machine and go from there.

I have a dedicated 1GB DDR3 video card on my laptop and it doesn't render the same output no matter how much adjustment I do.

Look at your laptop docs -- you should find what controls and capabilites are available for an external monitor. It's pretty common to have dual monitor support in the sense that you can have two active displays that can either show the same desktop or can toggled to split up the desktop or can only have one active display, but this will all depend on the actual design of the laptop.

As to sharing a monitor with a desktop PC, well, the old "standard" way of doing this is with an A/B switch -- you'd click A to view the desktop display, B to view the laptop. The switches I used were fine with a VGA display, these days there may be switches that can handle DVI/HDMI stuff as well, I don't know. But your laptop/desktop/monitor will, I suspect, have VGA ports, and you will need the A/B switch. With that, you just plug in the cable output from the switch to the laptop when you want/need to.