Use your Laptop as an Additional Monitor
If you have both a desktop PC and a laptop, then this is for you. I’ve always thought that I should be able to use my laptop screen as a second monitor when I’m in the office. The feature is so nearly built into Windows with Remote Desktop, but that’s the opposite of what I want to do. When I’m using my desktop computer, I want my tablet PC to just act as a dumb display panel. Well, I was reading Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen blog and I discovered there is a program that does exactly what I want! It is called MaxiVista. All that is needed is a network connection between the two computers. MaxiVista has a server and a client, the server runs on the laptop, the 
client on the desktop PC. You can use the display control panel to position the new additional monitor relative to the others, just as if it were a real screen. Great! Just what I’ve always wanted. A new way to make use of that laptop when you’re back in the office – as an extra monitor. In the screen clipping here, you can see my Tablet PC as monitor number 3, in portrait mode, which is just great for displaying a page of A4.
If you haven’t used a multi-display system, I so recommend that you give it a try. It is so much more useful than a single display. Especially if you use something like Visual Studio, which is just begging for a second monitor to put all those toolboxes and information panels on. If you happen to have a laptop, MaxiVista will let you try out multiple-screen working for just a fistful of dollars. This is also useful if all your expansion slots are full up and you don’t have room for an additional video card.
Ironically though, this is one area where the new Ribbon introduced in Office 2007 is less useful. In the old version of Office, most of the programs had toolbars that you could ‘tear off’ and move onto a second display. So far, I haven’t found a way to do that in Office 2007.
Best regards,