What would be really great, for LV development on a laptop, is a MXI3 Cardbus card or a firewire to PXI Bus extension.
Tim -----Original Message----- From: David Thomson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, 19 February 2004 5:32 a.m. To: lv >> LabVIEW list; William Keogh Subject: RE> Dual monitors with a laptop William Keogh wrote: >I would like to have a dual monitor setup with a laptop (ie, use the >laptop screen as the first screen and an external monitor as the second >screen). Can anyone offer comparisons between such a setup and a >desktop system with a high performance graphics card? I am concerned >that the laptop graphics card may not give good video quality on the >second monitor. ... William, I started using a laptop as my main development computer a few years ago. The way I get away with it is by using an expansion chassis from Magma. (Magma has been displaying at NIWeek some of the past years.) They use a cardbus interface to extend the PCI bus to an external box. Currently, I have a IDE card running a DVD-RAM drive, a video card, and a FireWire/USB2 card in the chassis, with room for one more card. (Magma has tested their products with NI Daq cards, so my intention has been to plug in NI cards for testing in the extra slot.) At my office, I connect the laptop to the expansion chassis and have two monitors running. In the field, I usually just take the laptop and live with one monitor. For most office work (e-mail, word processing) the second monitor is just fine. But in truth, it is a bit sluggish for LabVIEW wiring. Moving objects is often tedious as the graphics take a noticiable fraction of a second to respond to your mouse clicks. In general, the Magma works well, but I did have to fuss with it a bit to get a stable configuration. As you add more cards and demand more bandwidth from the cardbus bus, things can act up. Frankly, I'm surprised I can get away with the load I am using. But if I start writing a lot of data to the DVD-RAM, I can see performance hits with other tasks. Another example - one USB2 card I installed used so much bandwidth (even with nothing connected) that the monitor did not get updated properly. So it depends on how you use it. If you develope your diagrams on the built-in monitor, and use the 2nd for other tasks, you'd probably find it acceptable. I manage with it even when I have LV on the 2nd monitor, but it does get a little frustrating at times. Due to the bandwidth problem, I did look for other solutions at one point. I bought a cardbus video adapter from Margi. Not that cheap, not very high performance (e.g. only 4MB). Also, I never was sure that putting the video on a different cardbus slot would really ease the overall cardbus bandwidth issue. In any case, I couldn't get the Margi and the Magma to coexist, so that didn't work out for me. But I thought you might like to know that the Margi solution does exist. Whether or not you would find it acceptable, I don't know. Good luck, Dave ------------------------------------------------------------- David Thomson 303-499-1973 (voice and fax) Original Code Consulting [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.originalcode.com National Instruments Alliance Program Member Certified LabVIEW Developer Certified Instrument Driver Developer ------------------------------------------------------------- Research Scientist 303-497-3470 (voice) NOAA Aeronomy Laboratory 303-497-5373 (fax) Boulder, Colorado [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------------- There are 10 kinds of people: those who understand binary, and those who don't.
