Laptop LCD conversion to extra monitor

[SteveOBHave]

I'm not too sure if this has been discussed before, I did a search and could find nothing. I understand the difficulties involved, especially as there is generally no controller built into laptop LCDs, and as such need the PCB built into the laptop to actually drive the LCD.

I am thinking of attempting to convert a laptop into an extra monitor, and I believe that there is an application called MaxiVista that allows you to network a laptop with your PC and use it as an extra monitor. Of course it has some limitations such as not being able to run 3d on the monitor and not being able to watch DVDs but it will act as a secondary monitor to use whilst gaming so that I can see Teamspeak etc. My main concern is to get rid of the unsightly keyboard, something that can possibly be addressed by dissasembling the LCD from the main machine and flipping it like a tablet PC.

Ideally I'd like to remove the "laptop" component all together and utilise the monitor. Figured it would be an interesting project, with the ulitimate target of keeping the conversion price below that of a new monitor - hard work these days when you can purchase an OcUK 19" Widescreen LCD for around £130...

Game on?

 

[SteveOBHave]

Well, hooked the laptop up, after a large amount of 'faffing'.

Ideally I should be using a hub or a small switch to link the two machines, but decided to do it the complicated way. I have wireless for my interweb and have utilised the onboar nic with a crossover cable to link the who machines. I then had to bridge the two connections so that they could share the internet connection. It wouldn't have a bar of it until I set both nics to full compatibility mode. Finally I had to manually set the nic on the laptop to the same subnet and using the same DNS settings for it all to work. Yay worked... but...

When I kick into a game, how the Maxivista reacts seems to be a little random, and I can't move the cursor out of the game and click on the seconday window without it attempting to bring up the desktop on my primary monitor...

Looks like I will be saving my ping to buy a new monitor Still was an interesting experiment and it does actually work, albeit in a complex and with slightly less than desirable stability that I would prefer. Had my first BSOD in over a year from leaving it on overnight...