Does A2A have a cold?

---

arrgggghhhhhh you bad man

That is SO wrong! Can't even reply with out scooching over!BUT I really wanna know how many peops just HAD to see how far he carried that? blushing puts hand in air and squeeks "me"...

If I full-size the browser, so it's 1280 across, I can see the whole thing. If sdp had kept typing, those without 1600- or 1920-wide screens would have to resort to horizontal scrolling.Have you seen the Apple extra-wide LCD screens? Wow. I think there's only a couple of graphic cards that support its interface (twin DVI connectors).

Yup, XP supports concatenating screens. You can set the screen arrangement in the control panel.Of course Apple supported that kind of thing first.

Intel!
PC's win for the most part, everyday bullshit like this forum or writing emails and letters and stuff. its widely available and cheaper then apples stuff. Long ago apple was king then they said we want to copy your computers and sell them cheaper and apple said NO! but IBM said sure and thus began apples fall.
Now if your going to go for everyday stuff pay less and buy a PC as the rest of the world uses it your pretty safe compatibility wise, but if your doing graphics or editing books with graphics or graphic design or any of that type of shit, spend the money and buy the Mac.
Least thats how i feel about it Mac kicks ass in graphic capabilities and the PC wins for office tasking.

OK here's a question for you guys.

My wife works as a dental assistant in a small dental office. I help take care of his computers in exchange for free dental work. Good deal!

Anyways, he bought PCI video cards to add to his computers in the office. He wants to install LCD TV's in the ceiling so that people can watch a DVD from the chair while lying back. On a standard monitor hooked into the preexisting VGA output, he wants to be able to view his patient chart via the dental program. He installed the PCI video card when I wasn't there and asked me to come in a figure it out.

What happens is that he gets a double wide display (needs 2 monitors to see everything). However, 1 is the primary display and everything you open, opens in that display and then you can drag things over to the other display. What he wanted/envisioned was having a single display where you can use a hot key to switch the output to one screen or the other (i.e standard monitor and LCD TV). What kind of a video setup would I need in order for me to do this. Do I need a video card that has dual outputs (a VGA and a S-video output) and forget about the built-in video output?

I'm thinking the current setup might not be a bad setup except that they would have to drag the DVD movie into the 2nd (TV) display. He also wants to be able to show the patient the chart on his dental program which can hold digitized xrays so that he could explain procedures. This he wants to show on the TV as opposed to the monitor on the table/bench. I'm thinking, this can also be dragged over when he wants to show them something. This way he can have his charting on the monitor while the patient has the DVD going at the same time.

I've never messed with this too much, so I don't have options to suggest to the doc.

Nah, just Windows, since that's what's used as a development platform wherever I work, and I definitely don't want to have to deal with two different kinds of PCs. A while back I bought an Apple Portable (gigantic laptop) from someone for $50. It had a broken hard drive, but I could boot off an external one, since it had a SCSI interface. The thing only had 4 megabytes of RAM, but could still run MS Word! Ah, the good old days. I don't think I use many more features of Word now than I did then.I do have some experience with Sun's Sparcstaion Unix environment. But TI's switching their DSP development tools to Windows ended that.I'm not a PC/Linux/Unix/OS X expert or hacker. To me a PC is just a buggy tool. The only computer in my house is a Sony laptop. I'm more of a nuts-and-bolts embedded software dude...more along the lines of video image ringing-versus-sharpness tradeoffs than OS hacking.I have a friend who architects big-iron telecom hardware, and he's evolved into quite the Linux hacker. He's my go-to guy for that kind of stuff.

My current and previous laptops have ATI video "cards", and ATI has a tray icon that you can right click on and quickly chose the display format you want. I used to use that when I brought the laptop to the office and plugged in a higher-resolution external display. I'm sure you can do the same with two computer monitors on a desktop PC with pretty much any dual monitor graphics card.Are you saying that the ceiling monitor doesn't have a VGA (or DVI) input, just analog video? I thought you could only get the dual-wide monitor thing if both monitors had digital interfaces.[This thread is too wide!]

He claims the ceiling monitor has a VGA input. I haven't seen these monitors yet.But the video card he bought was a plain old 8MB PCI single output video card. It was really bizarre though becasue we plugged in the single monitor into the new video card we would see nothing except the background and and the mouse. I could right-click on teh desktop and hit properties and nothing would show. It was only when we plugged in teh monitor into the original on-board video output did we see that the display properties were opening up on the "Primary display" which was the onboard graphics card. So get got a second monitor and plugged it into the added adapter and then realized that we were getting the dual-wide display and we could drad things over from teh Primary display to the secondary. Kind of neat.

OK... From now on, I'm a big fan of SteveA [even if he doesnt't support linux]!!!!Opera is an awesome browser. For heavy user (like SteveA) it must be the perfect browsing tool. It's fast and reliable. For other simple users, I'd recommend Firefox. I believe Firefox still has more compabilities than Opera and it still has more extensions. Generally, you're free to use any browser except IE. IE sucks for many reasons! For example. the main cause of this dialer-panic is IE's technology. So, simply never use it!I also own a Sony laptop, but I'm using GNU/Linux instead of this pathetic OS (I'm talking about Windows XP) :P

I would expect that a large enough TV/monitor to be reasonably viewable on a ceiling would have a VGA (analog) input. The problem is, if the VGA cable is more than a couple of meters long (or less), the picture's going to be kind of crappy. [Note: When I said "digital interface" above, I misspoke. I meant DVI (digital) or VGA (analog).] A good VGA cable of any length will be kind of expensive.

But your problem is that a DVD video plays either in full-screen (covering both displays), or in a window, which doesn't look cool. I'm not sure what the solution to that is. Also, if the computer is doing heavy stuff, the movie might burp and stutter.

What about audio? From the TV or from a headset? If it's from the TV, it might just be easier to get a separate DVD player, plug it into the S-video input, run a VGA or DVI cable from the PC to the TV, and get a programmable remote so that with one button push, you can pause the DVD and switch the TV input to VGA, and with another button push, switch back.

In any case, you can get a very good pair of virtual reality glasses for a lot less than the cost of a decent LCD or plasma display. It would also be a more engrossing experience. I don't know if cleanliness would be an issue, though, since glasses with built-in displays obviously can't be sterilized.

Good question. Will it really cover both screens or just the first?? Hmmm.. We'll have to try it. I guess it would have to play in window mode in order to drag it across to display #2 (TV).The plan was for audio from the computer via headsets so that audio CD's can be played too. The computer won't be doing much processing, so burps won't be an issue. A fart, maybe, but not a burp.

In reply to: All of a sudden the text in some posts are going way off the right end of my screen me toousualy, the cause is an uninterupted string of characters but I can't see an obvious cause latelylife has bigger worries

I downloaded Opera last night. I didn't care for it last night, but I'm liking it more tonight.

In reply to: I didn't care for it last night, but I'm liking it more tonight. ... if i had a dollar for every time........

It's a bit of a "culture shock" if you're used to Firefox or IE, but it works very well, and it's more secure than IE.

In reply to: ... if i had a dollar for every time........ HA! LOL!