With my last laptop I had two monitors connect by adding a PCI video card to the docking station. The problem, however, was that the two video cards I tried prevented me from undocking the laptop even when I hibernated. The only way I could remove the laptop was if I shut down the laptop entirely. This was very aggravating (especially when running late for a meeting), so much so that I now just doing the single monitor thing. There are several ways to get dual monitor support for a laptop, however, so I decided to investigate another.
Recently I wondered if there were PCMCIA video boards that might enable the dual monitor thing. The two cards I came across, Appian Traveler (reviewed here) and Display-to-Go (reviewed here) were also both missing any power management support so they were no better than a PCI card.
For a while the I was searching to find a half size (so that it fits in my docking station) PCI video card that supports power management. At one point I was thinking I just had to find a PCI video card that was Windows XP certified but from what I can tell, this is an impossibility since Windows XP requires video cards to be AGP. Stink!
Anyway, Christian Studer (http://www.realtimesoft.com) points out that the real issue is that Windows doesn't support disabling a video card without rebooting the system but if this is changed in a future release of Windows, it should then be possible to undock without problems. Any chance you could do this for me Microsoft?
8:16:25 AM
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