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Rdysan

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Using two video outputs simultaneously (VGA and DVI) on Acer Travelmate 8104WLMi

Hi there,

I have just bought an Acer Travelmate 8104WLMi, which has both VGA and DVI video connections.  I want to use the laptop primarily to run conference presentations at an upcoming event.  I haven't received the product yet, so I can't try it myself.

The presentations will be screened via projector on a large screen behind the speaker.  As the Asus has both VGA and DVI outputs ideally I would like to port the video out to both the VGA (going to the projector) and via the DVI going to a stand-alone TFT monitor facing towards the panel of speakers so they can follow the presentations without having to turn around continually and look at the screen behind them.

Is this technically possible, or would it be a choice of either the VGA or DVI outputting at any one time?  Also, the screen of the laptop wouild have to be active, so the speaker can follow the presentation.  The Asus has an ATI Mobility Radeon X700 Pro PCI-E dedicated 128MB card and supports DualView.  PC is a 2GHz Sonoma with 2GHz RAM

If not possible, is there a way to piggy back off the VGA signal to drive the projector and an additional monitor (or even two)?

Thanks for any help with this one!

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Callandor
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bluepointx

And exactly how much does this gadget costs? I mean, I wouldn't spend too much money just to improve the looks of the setup so that there will be one wire instead of two.
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Thanks, everyone.  I think, although the cloning hardware will hopefully woirk fine, it sad that the system probably won't be able to port out the video onto both connections simultaneously.  I should get the pC mid-week and will let you kow if tjis is not the case.  Thanks also for the word of warning, waterc00ler, as it's an imporatnt conference for me and will use video (usualkly embedded in Powerpoint presentations).  I shall try a trial run before the event.
waterc00ler, your problem was similar to the TV-out function on most VGA cards. They'r default setting is to project only the overlay and not the primary drawing surface, let me tell you exactly what happens: When you boot up, the image appears on the secondary display, everything's fine until you try playing a video. When you open a video file using the Windows Media Player, the center (where the video should be) remains black while you can still see the frame of the wmplayer.

If you're lucky enough, the issue will be solved quite easy by navigating to the video board advanced menu where you will probably find the "Clone image" option which will make possible for the primary surface to be projected on the secondary display as well.

From my experience, BSplayer is using overlay to project video, this program will work but if you have subitles you will still have to navigate through the BSplayer menu and select "Draw subtitles to overlay surface".

Cheers.
Oh, the key combination to toggle the monitor output on my Acer Aspire 3000 is:

Fn+F5