I have a Dell Latitude D830 laptop running vista and would like to add four external monitors. The three Monitors are ACER S201HL bd 20 inch Widescreen.
What combination of adapters or other products that you sell would you recommend? Thank You
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for your post about connecting external monitors. We have a range of USB graphics adapters that allow users to connect extra monitors via a USB cable.
Your monitor’s maximum resolution is 1600 x 900 so either of our Adapters using the DisplayLink DL165 chip will work well.
They are the Plugable USB-VGA-165 and the Plugable UGA-165 USB 2.0 to VGA/DVI/HDMI. You can see them here: Plugable Products.
Your Dell D830 will have a VGA output for the first monitor so you’ll need one less USB adapter than the total number of external monitors.
Because USB graphics use system resources, hardware constraints will effect performance. While your system does meet the minimum hardware listed here:UGA-165 you’ll want to run any graphics intensive applications on the main monitor. And, the more system memory (RAM) you have the better!
Also, with all the USB connections you may want a USB Hub. It will add the convenience of connecting all your USB Graphics Adapters through one USB cable and provide ports for things like printers, cameras, and external hard drives. It’s important to use a powered hub to avoid problems of the hub not having enough current available as you connect more devices.
Here’s our 4,7 and 10 port option.
I hope this helps to make your decision, let us know if there’s any thing else we do!
Happy Holidays,
Jerome.
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for asking ahead!
The older Dell Latitude D830 (Windows Vista preload) has a Core 2 Duo processor works well (although newer Core i3/5/7 processors will be noticeably faster with USB graphics).
It has either Intel or nVidia graphics, either of which will work well on Vista. Vista doesn’t support multi-monitors as well as Windows 7 (both in terms of performance and control panel UI features), so another upgrade you might consider is moving up to Win7. It’s a nice step up from Vista. But it’s not essential.
The Acer S201HL BD 20" has a 1600x900 max resolution and both VGA and DVI connectors. So all of our products except the UGA-125 and DC-125 can support its native resolution.
Since you don’t need the absolute highest resolutions, the best match is our $54.95 UGA-165 http://plugable.com/products/uga-165 if you want DVI connectivity, or our $44.95 UGA-VGA-165 http://plugable.com/products/usb-vga-… for VGA only (visually, most people won’t notice the difference with VGA).
For Vista (and even for Win7), we’d recommend running DisplayLink’s 5.6 M1 drivers (here: http://displaylink.com/support/sla.ph…) because they’ve proven to be very stable on older OSes, and you don’t need the features in DisplayLink’s newest 6.x drivers (which are mostly focused on upcoming USB 3 hardware).
And, lastly, to connect multiple adapters you’ll want a powered USB hub. We’d recommend our $21.95 7 port hub http://plugable.com/products/usb2-hub… It has plenty of power, lots of people pair it with up to 6 graphics adapters, and will give you a few extra ports to spare.
Let us know if you have any questions or problems at all - we’re here to help. But once the drivers are installed via the above link, it should be all plug and play.
Hope that helps. Thanks again for asking ahead! This is a good question to answer for others.
Best wishes,
Bernie
And you get two answers for the price of one! Each answer has a few good details to think about, so take a look at both. 