Archive for December, 2009
AskTheAdmin.com Updates
Dec 10th
We have been having issues on and off. As you know we have moved hosts and now we have redesigned the site. Stay tuned for more improvements and enhancements. What do you guys want to see more of? I will be adding advertisements slots as well as some other surprises. We are still looking for new contributors if you are interested let me know in the comments!
_TheUpdatingAdmiN_Adding a second (or third monitor) to your windows machine the ghetto method.
Dec 10th
Hey there cheapskate… I haven’t said that in a while.
Well if you find yourself here you are either an avid AtA reader or you are looking for a cheap dual monitor solution. Sure you could go buy a shinny purty new video card with multiple outputs and do this the easy way but, we are here to give you an alternative. If you are like us you live amongst a computer graveyard or a pile of technology…
Whatever you call your crap aka where the old computer go to die, find yourself a video card and a crt monitor.
I grabbed a old PCI graphics card from a 6 year old non-branded machine. This is as generic as they come. I currently have a ati graphics card in my machine but I leave that alone and add the second card. I connected a 19″ crt beast to it and booted back up into Windows XP.
The second monitor went green but no image was displayed on the screen. This is a great start.
I then went into the display properties by right clicking on my desktop and choosing Properties. You will see this screen:
Click the settings button and then click the picture of the monitor. Now select extend my desktop on to this screen.
Hit apply and now anything you drag to the right border of your screen will move on over to the other display! Now I can keep my mail queue, inbox, analytics or pretty much anything open FULL SCREEN and still have enough real estate to work. Once you get this going you will never want to go back – so be forewarned you might wind up dropping a pretty penny for some bezel-less monitors and that fancy graphics card after all.
Seeming this graphic card I used is ancient I can only get 1024×768 on the secondary monitor – not a deal breaker but I will be on the lookout for some more junk a better graphic card
HP Mini 5101 Review
Dec 1st
We were lucky enough to have HP send us a HP Mini 5101 net book to play with. It has followed me around everywhere for the last month. I used a Mobile Broadband Card provided by Verizon for my Internet access and connectivity. I have been able to remote desktop into all of my servers, surf the web, connect via VPN to my corporate network, easily use Skype for speaking to my daughter via the built in Camera and Microphone.
This little guy weighs about 3 pounds putting my 4.3 pound tablet in it’s place (Docked at home). But some of the features of this 1.66 ghz Atom Processor toting machine are very impressive.
The machine is made from metal and not plastic meaning it is rugged. It is scratch proof and has a water resistant keyboard (which is almost full sized), it has a hard drive protection scheme which allows for the hard drive to be locked if it falls – protecting your data (Not the computer!)
So a ruggedized net book in a home with a 2 year old how did it hold up you ask?
Very well! She absolutely loved it. She did try to touch the screen a lot but she has gotten used to touch screens so she can not be faulted! She drooled on it without any issues – she also could not pick off the keys which are recessed making them more resistant to dust and what not which is great for many reasons. This thing is very durable and I didn’t put a scratch or dent in my adventures with it.
As an added bonus it looks like my day job is going to be grabbing a few of these guys for our sales reps being so cheap and all…
Here are the specs of the mini I had:
