Questiong for all the techies!! Heres what I'm looking to do. I would like to make my current computer a webserver only and get rid of my monitor. Then I would have a clear desk and I would get a laptop for my personal use. My question is this. I have an ATI Radeon VE video card in my "webserver" is there any kind of adapter or anything that would allow me to connect my "webserver" to my laptop so that I would be able to utilze the screen of my laptop?? My video card as "2" standard outputs as well as an s-video out for like tv out. Is something like this possible? The reason I ask is becuase currently I have a tv tuner in this "webserver" that I would still like to be able to watch every now and then, also it will be conveinent if I ever needed to do any work to it. Let me know if you have any ideas.... Thanks, Dave

So you want to run the video from your desktop computer on your laptop screen? In a word, no. It is possible to do, but wouldn't be worth the time/effort required to do it. There's no adapter that you can just go and purchase at Radio Shack. The LCD screen on a laptop connects to the video card in the laptop base through a special cable that is usually different between different laptop makers and is definatelly not used in desktop PCs. With a little research and a lot of electronics experience, you might be able to get it to work, but then the LCD monitors on laptops just aren't all that hot for displaying high-end graphics anyway. They usually have a maximum resolution of 1024x768 (1280x1024 if you're lucky) and a refresh rate of 60-70 Hz. They're also extremely notorious for ghosting/tearing when the graphics start moving to quickly across the screen. There are other ways that you can 'network' your desktop to a laptop to share files and the internet and stuff like that, but you're always going to be stuck with whatever graphics the laptop has when using the laptop. Lloyd

Thanks Lloyd. I know i can ftp or even pcanywhere into the desktop but the only problem is with the tv tuner, theres no way to run it through pcanywhere it's just not fast enough. One other question though. My desktop does have an s-video out connection. Is there any laptop video cards or adapters that have s-video in connections that you know of? Thanks

I've never seen a laptop with any type of video input built-in. I think that would be pretty rare if it exists at all. However, there are lots of after-market 'video capture' type devices (some with TV tuners) that plug into the USB port or even ones in a PCMCIA card, so something like that could be used on the laptop to watch TV. You can do a search on Ebay and find stuff for cheap. Please note that this solution would only work for watching movies or playing video games from the Playstation or something along these lines. You couldn't use this in conjunction with the video out on your desktop's graphics card to try to put your desktop's 'desktop' onto the laptop (say that 5 times fast). The capture resolution just isn't high enough. Trust me, I've tried. You're basically taking a 1024x768 image, compressing it down to 320x240 with a crappy MPEG hardware CODEC, then blowing that 320x240 image back up to 1024x768 which basically just triples the pixels horizontally and vertically and makes for some extremely blocky looking graphics. Any text that was on the original screen becomes completely unreadable on the other end. Desktop icons are barely recognizable. Etc, etc, etc. If you just want to run cable or satellite TV (rabbit ears if you're old-skool) into the laptop, it will look fine. Hopefully if you combine one of these capture devices with the pcanywhere then maybe you can do everything you originally intended? Let me know if I can be of any more help. Lloyd