iBook 12" and (large) external monitors

[Stephen G]

Greetings,
I bought my iBook, 12", 1.2ghz second hand off of a forum.
I have myself installed OS X Tiger clean install from a retail box of Tiger.

I know I am not supposed to be able to, but I have been using it recently with screen spanning on a 19" Dell LCD @ 1280x1024, and it works quite well. However this LCD is not mine, and I was only testing it out to make sure it works before I buy an LCD myself.

As it did work, and it did not seem overly slow or anything, I was tempted to swing for the 20" Dell Widescreen @ 1680x1050. Can my video card drive this resolution over the normal VGA port?

Otherwise I can always go with the Westinghouse 17" widescreen @ 1280x768, but this 20" Dell is so much nicer, and not particularly more expensive once you go coupon-crazy on dell.com.

Any experience/comments/suggestions on using an iBook with a large monitor?

 

[vinividivici]

biggest suggestion would be to get an external kb and mouse and kick it in clamshell mode, thus keeping all the vram to the one big monitor instead of splitting it between two.

 

[Stephen G]

ibook's aren't supposed to be closed, they dissapate most of their heat through the keyboard/top and need to be kept open.

You cannot, without some sort of hack, disable the 'sleep when lid is closed' function.

I could of course turn the monitor off by dimming it until it turns off, but I do not know if this will turn off the other monitor too (I guess I will test).

But more so, my question is... will my graphics card even pump out that resolution for me? If I plug in the monitor and it detects it, as it does my 19" LCD... will the native resoltuon option be there (1680x1050)? Is 1280x1024 the max? Is there any way to check the max?

thanks

 

[Garage81]

i had an ibook with the radeon 9200 and it woudlnt drive 1600x1200. it would, but it looked and ran like ass.

those graphics cards arent meant to go that high with dual monitor support.

but of course, ymmv.

 

[M1dknight]

I was wondering about that display aswell but am also unsure if it will work on my mini.
Do you have access to a crt (I don't or I would try this) as you could try and run at 1600x1200 and if that works it should work on the 2005 FPW

 

[bahula03]

just fyi, when the display on my 12" powerbook is dimmed, it simply turns off the backlight, and the screen continues to be rendered by the video card.

 

[PCJ]

google for "screen spanning doctor"

That program solves all your problems. And it's free.

 

[Stephen G]

Thanks, but I have no problem getting it to span, or letting me do greater than 1024x768 res. I thought thats what the screen spanning doctor is for. So either the guy that had it before me did it, or I got a flukey iBook. Either way, spanning and higher res are not the issue.

I am really just looking to see performance experience of those with bigger monitors on their 12" ibook.

 

[denaps]

hello

i have SSD installed on my 1.2GHz ibook G4. i plug it into an NEC fp2141 at home running 1600x1200.

it works no problem at that resolution. but i do notice chunkiness and choppiness when dragging windows around in real time on the big monitor. i think the iBook vid card can handle what you want to do, but if I wouldn't expect to get good performance with 3D apps or a lot of core-graphics goodies.

to me screen spanning doctor is great because it allows me to do photo-editing on the huge monitor with good speed.

jeff

 

[Maad]

I was wondering about that display aswell but am also unsure if it will work on my mini.
Do you have access to a crt (I don't or I would try this) as you could try and run at 1600x1200 and if that works it should work on the 2005 FPW

Your mini will be fine, apparently. The mini can drive DVI displays at 1920x1200. Stephen's iBook, though, might have serious issues getting good output for resolutions like that with analog...