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Superchicken · Jan 17, 2003, 03:19 PM

Hey all, I'm just wondering, i'm planning on buying a 12 inch power book and hooking it up to a 17 or 19 inch CRT monitor in my dorm room for college next year, so I have a tiny laptop for notes and stuff, but have a nice powerful G4 for when I'm in my dorm doing web design and doing work on photos and junk.
I was just reading in one of the posts about keynote that if you have two monitors it kidna splits the VRAM for Quartz Extream, my question is, would having a 12 inch and a 17 or 19 inch CRT monitor running off a Geforce Go 420 task the card to much, IE give my system a slow and sluggish feel? I mean yeah I know it'll feel fast initially no matter what esspecially since I'm upgrading from a 333Mhz G3 iMac, but I'm just thinking, any idea what the proformance with monitor spanning will be with this card and quartz extream... might it be smart to maybe go with a 17 inch monitor instead seeing as how it's smaller and should work the card less... or just run the 19 inch at a lower resolution or something.

Also I'm thinking I might end up using keynote when it goes to version 2 for my mom's cosmetic buisness... the regional sales mannager or something has a toshiba old icky laptop and they were using a nice philips projector probably the hotel's, and I'd LOVE for my mom to be able to make presentations that could blow this other peron's out of the water... cause this other person is kinda... well I don't like her

mitchell_pgh · Jan 17, 2003, 04:02 PM

It does split the vram, but it should be just fine. You may notice it in games etc, but for photo editing, you should be fine...

The 12" has 32 MB of vram. That's more then enough for most things. Even at 16 per, you should be just fine.

Keynote must have 8 MB of vram to run (but damn does it look nice. If you don't need a few key features of PowerPoint, i would say move over now... It's amazing!

Superchicken · Jan 17, 2003, 06:37 PM

I acctually don't do either

But I intend to buy keynote soon after I max out my RAM, buy myself graphics software, and buy the monitor... hence mom might get it for Christmas

With an Edu discount it should be about 60 bucks ish.

But OK thanks, yeah I don't play games so that's good, I'm just paranoid I'd HATE to have anywhere near the proformance of OS X as far as speed goes, on a brand new notebook. Sorry but 333Mhz G3s were NOT made for OS X

But I figure with 600 megs of RAM in that puppy it should be quite zippy.
Just wanted to make sure... what would you say about possibly running a DVD on the big monitor, and still doing work on the powerbook?
I really havn't done any work with DVDs on computers, or monitor spanning... so could I set it up to have the DVD going on the one monitor and keep working on my PB's 12 inch screen?

Liquidity X · Jan 17, 2003, 06:57 PM

whe playing somthing full screen, the 2nd display is disabled and full vram goes tot he active display

godzookie2k · Jan 17, 2003, 07:24 PM

Originally posted by Superchic[k]en:
I
I really havn't done any work with DVDs on computers, or monitor spanning... so could I set it up to have the DVD going on the one monitor and keep working on my PB's 12 inch screen?

Actually apple's dvd player software has a bug that doesn't let you play the window on a secondary monitor, it will only play on the monitor that has the menu bar, very annoying. I reccommend vnc, just because it plays on any monitor.

Superchicken · Jan 17, 2003, 08:43 PM

RATS!
Any way that I could hook it up by the S video and hook it into a TV at least?

[APi]TheMan · Jan 18, 2003, 12:53 AM

Originally posted by godzookie2k:
I reccommend vnc, just because it plays on any monitor.

*cough* Errr, you mean VLC (videolan.org).

wataru · Jan 18, 2003, 01:02 AM

Originally posted by Superchic[k]en:
RATS!
Any way that I could hook it up by the S video and hook it into a TV at least?

You can view DVDs on external monitors and TVs, you just have to either turn on video mirroring or move the menu bar to the other screen.

OreoCookie · Jan 18, 2003, 12:42 PM

Works fine for me (new Dual 800) with display hack (exact configuration you were talking about).
If you have only 16 Megs of RAM for your graphics card, there is another hack, ...
The new ones have 32 though which is plenty.

UnixMac · Jan 18, 2003, 11:34 PM

I wonder if having more than 32MB does any good with Quartz Extreme, one or two monitors... does anyone know if there is a speed benefit?

OreoCookie · Jan 19, 2003, 07:22 AM

Originally posted by UnixMac:
I wonder if having more than 32MB does any good with Quartz Extreme, one or two monitors... does anyone know if there is a speed benefit?

QE doesn't work on two monitors if you have 16 Megs only. You can always hack it, but the speed is not as good.