Bartels Media's MaxiVista Virtual Graphics Adapter

Get a two-monitor display for the price of a meal - we forgoe our haute cuisine to look at the bigger picture...

With MaxiVista you can! This ingenious piece of software pretends to be a graphics adapter. It fools Windows into thinking there is another display installed on your system, enabling Windows' multi-monitor capabilities and allowing you to extend your desktop across two monitors just as if you had a multi-monitor graphics card. This extra screen is transmitted to a second PC via a network connection.

MaxiVista was developed with laptops in mind although other scenarios suggest themselves, too. As users know, laptops don't have a video input but with MaxiVista you can put the laptop alongside your main PC for double-screen operation. If you already have two PCs close together, this is a quick and easy way to double your screen real-estate. And if you have an old PC and monitor gathering dust, you could press them into service although you would need to create a network connection first.

Windows XP makes networking very easy (well, as easy as networking can be) and the typical Ethernet LAN (Local Area Network) can be set up on two machines with a simple crossover cable which you can buy for a few pounds. PCs can also be networked via FireWire, USB, and a wireless LAN on a laptop will work, too. Many laptops are already kitted out for this.

The viewer and the viewed

Installation is easy but read the instructions carefully. The installer creates a Server program on the main PC. It also creates a Viewer program which it puts on the desktop and which must be copied to the second PC. The Server software 'serves' the screen data via the network to the Viewer program. When they're both up and running you can extend your desktop onto the second monitor.

The secondary display has three modes. The default is Full-screen mode where the display matches the Viewer application's resolution. In Windows mode, the display appears in a window which you can move around the screen. This allows you to see some of the second PC's native content, too, letting you keep an eye on anything which it's running. The third mode is Fit-to-screen which magnifies the images placed on it.

The developer claims very low CPU usage, up to 5 percent, and indeed it is very low although if you're already maxing out your CPU with effects and virtual synths you may not want any more load. The software does on-the-fly compression and we could see some judder when dragging a window on the second display although we were using a rather slow PC. However, most applications don't require you to do this and we had good results using two monitors with a sequencer and other music software.

The freedom you feel when you using a second monitor is liberating and tangible. If you have a laptop then MaxiVista is an absolute essential add-on, and if you have two PCs closely placed it will be a very tempting buy.