Frequently asked questions

Please find a few comments about questions we frequently hear from users about MaxiVista.

"Is my monitor not big enough?"

Please try this: Cover a third of your monitor with a piece of paper. You will surely miss the lost display real estate quickly. Now imagine that you could not only have back your normal monitor size but even get twice the desktop space.

If you ever worked with a multi monitor setup, you will never want to miss it again - Promised. It is too comfortable to be able to temporarily branch out program windows to the other screen or to drag&drop information between applications from one screen to another.

Bill Gates' speech at WinHEC 2002: "Our research shows that productivity gains for standard tasks, window management, office, switching between documents, you can get productivity gains with multi-monitor anywhere from 20 to 50 percent."

"I assume that the display refresh rate is too slow?!"

Please have a look at the MaxiVista performance video

"Isn't MaxiVista the same like VNC or RemoteDesktop?!"

VNC or RemoteDesktop of Windows XP are remote desktop utilities to control remotely located PCs and therefore transfer the screen contents across the LAN. Transferring screen contents is the sole conjoint with MaxiVista.

MaxiVista however does not duplicate screen contents across the LAN, but extend the monitor real estate of your primary PC with the help of any secondary PC. As you can see in the animations, the mouse cursor and windows can be moved or stretched from one monitor to the other as it would be one big display.

Furthermore, the CPU load is significantly lower compared to VNC because of the virtual driver technology.

"Does MaxiVista not add additional load to the PC?"

The core part of MaxiVista is a virtual video card driver. However, if you would like to run two physical display monitors you would also need a second device driver.

MaxiVista does only require CPU power to compress and transfer the screen data across the LAN if secondary screen content is changed. For static screen contents the CPU load rarely exceeds 1%.

"Does MaxiVista not waste electrical power?"

If you use MaxiVista together with e.g. a Laptop as the secondary display, the hard drive is running idle and will be automatically switched off by the power management. The CPU is also running more or less idle and activates its power saving mode.

Therefore, the laptop will not significantly take more energy than any additional stand-alone monitor plus the extra video card you alternatively would need to run a dual monitor setup.