http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?t=28423
^^ that was the "which notebook is best for gaming" thread,
and the problem is there are plenty of notebooks that will meet all your needs for years to come but at twice the price...if you lost track of spending, you'd have little change from $5000

Quote from Jakg :

Dell own Alienware, so Alienware is now a (naff) brand name.

Seriously, why get a "gaming laptop"? they're slow and REDICULOUSLY expensive for what they are! I'd get a cheap ultra-portable and a desktop, why can't you?

If I had the choice to own a desktop or a notebook of the same specs and price, i'm obviously gonna take the notebook , would not anyone?

At twice the price of it's bulkyer counterpart though it's just not a sensible option unless
... you have silly amounts of cash to spend on your hobby/work notebook, but all this got me thinking:icon23:

How can I use my old notebook as "wireless monitor"?...the notebooks specs won't matter. in turn cheap-cheap. The flexability of a notebook and the processing power from your "home server".

Okey, so how to network notebook and a PC running XP...run remote desktop on laptop or somethin ????

...I thought I was half making sense with the op...obviousley not

You want to use a laptop to control a PC, right?

You'll need something like VNC or a web-based service like LogMeIn installed on both PCs. However, you will not get the sound on the laptop and you can expect about 2FPS from the visuals, as all the remote-control apps do is send an interactive screenshot to the client PC.

Quote from TiJay :

You want to use a laptop to control a PC, right?

You'll need something like VNC or a web-based service like LogMeIn installed on both PCs. However, you will not get the sound on the laptop and you can expect about 2FPS from the visuals, as all the remote-control apps do is send an interactive screenshot to the client PC.

yeah, in theory I could use to or three old/slow notebooks around the house that use the PC as a kind of off board processing(if you get me). I think I'll look into the windows based remote apps, remote desktop, remote assistance first...but I I cant test it yet as im awaiting delivery og second machine.

What sort of things are you hoping to do? If you're into 3D, you could quite easily create a little render farm.

Quote from TiJay :

What sort of things are you hoping to do? If you're into 3D, you could quite easily create a little render farm.

I'd like to use the PC as a kind of server with three user accounts in XP. With three notebooks around the house for my kids missus etc. A kind of media centre/gaming server...but I can't have the notebooks doing anymore 'work' than just sending input info to server(mouse+keyboard) and recieving the screen and sound data(a kind of wireless keyboard+mouse+monitor).

So in theory I could have a notebook that isnt capeable of playing tetrus running any game/app 'through' the server PC.

So almost what you are suggesting is having the output of the video card sent via network or other means to another screen.

I'm sure there are ways and hardware to do it, but I can see it being a) very expensive, and b) too laggy for any sort of gaming. I don't know how much 'data' is sent via a digital link to a monitor, but I'm guessing its a lot. Not sure a conventional network could cope.

Tbh I don't really know what I'm talking about, but thats the impression I get.

Won't work for games and isn't all that great for other stuff. Most Windows versions already come with a remote desktop client and server, or you can use VNC, which is free.
You can open a session from your laptop into your desktop and use Word fine, but anything more involved will be dead slow. It's mostly a tool to do remote administration and things like that, not continuous use.
And not gaming. Well I guess Solitaire wouldn't be too bad.

I would be curious to know if a ~30fps video stream could be sustained on 100mbit lan connection???....At this point I don't know what questions to ask...
Network cards talk to other network cards using packets, right?...so I'd need an application that converts/squashes a video stream into network packets for sending over a lan?<... but only if the video stream can be contained at a good rate(fps) inside the bandwidth of 100mbit lan network...I dont know how to measure a video stream...how fast?lol does a video stream go in network packets terms???

...so the only 'work' being done on the notebook(client?) is receiving and processing network packets to display, which is not cpu or graphics card intensive.

Well, you can send VGA over a CAT5 cable: http://www.geocities.com.nyud. ... burbidge/vgaovercat5.html

A google search for VGA over LAN brought up a number of results.

So that's one way that's possible, but probably isnt worth it. You'd also lose a lot of signal quality over any sort of meaningful distance.

Its also worthy to note the maximum throughput of dual-link DVI is around 7.4Gbps, a home network wont come close to that. However actual throughput is resolution dependant so it may come down to an acceptable level using a standard-ish resolution. Minimum frequency is approx 20Mhz, which possibly equates to around 500Mbps. Again you are going to struggle to get that with a home network, unless everything has Gigabit NICs and is effecient.

Quote from pb32000 :

Minimum frequency is approx 20Mhz, which possibly equates to around 500Mbps.

...i can't see where you got that number from...is that video frequencey 20Mhz? I though video froequeney was measured in fps...the lowest possible being 25-40 fps for gaming. im lost.

Wikipedia exclusively.

I think the problem with video is you have to convert the video output after the output socket on the card, meaning hardware decoding etc. TBH I don't know how a remote desktop works. I shall investigate.


With a bit more investigation it seems you could, and should, use a 'Video Hook Driver', such as http://www.demoforge.com/dfmirage.htm to mirror video output ready to stream across a network. TightVNC uses that driver, and by the looks of it, may be quick enough for video, or maybe even games.

I'm gona give it a go myself as I'm interested in this myself. I eventually wish to have a cheap thin client in the louge for media, but have the PC decoding the (HD) video. At the moment my Xbox running XBMC does all thw work, but it can't process HD video due to its low power.

IIRC Windows Media Decoder has the option to setup a Network Stream, and to stream the screen on one PC over the network to another - i don't have it installed atm, but it might to exactly what you want.

Quote from Jakg :

IIRC Windows Media Decoder has the option to setup a Network Stream, and to stream the screen on one PC over the network to another - i don't have it installed atm, but it might to exactly what you want.

Yer it kinda does and it doesn't. Basically to encoded fullscreen (1680x1050) video into WMV9 uses a phenomenal amount of CPU time, as you can imagine, so it's then pretty much useless for trying to do anything else on the server. And the client still has to decoded the video, which if it is encoded and such a high resolution, requires a similarly powerful machine.

Keep the suggestions coming though!

ok, at this point I have my 'home server' set up, and the 'thin client' is mobile. I havent bothered to test windows media decoder as it was pointed out to be very cpu intensive. I'm using vnc for the moment to get work done.

Choices:

Windows media decoder - too cpu intensive
VNC - useless.
log me in - useless.
Windows remote applications(remote desktop...) - not an option.

I'd ask at this point for advice from someone around here whom has experience in windows networking, it must be possible to connect two pc's together in a home network scenario for all the usual file transfer, shared folders etc. and maintain a good video link at the same time?

I must point out the the use of remote desktop is not an option as the server runs xp-Home edition, and the client is Vista.

....God vnc is so damn useless it makes me cry....there must be an easyer way using the windows infrastructure rather than using vnc to send my info half way around the world and back to the client 10 feet away!


....Help!

VNC shouldn't be doing that dude, the client should be setup to listen to a port on the local network, I got mine working fine like that. Only problem is it's still too slow to support video properly.

Quote from pb32000 :

VNC shouldn't be doing that dude, the client should be setup to listen to a port on the local network, I got mine working fine like that. Only problem is it's still too slow to support video properly.

It's just how I imagine it sends the data(because it being so laggy and slow thats how it feels). Does the data go straight to router and the to client?...if so, why the hell is it so laggy and look so poor?

e; click
e#2;

Quote from http://www.microsoft.com/By Galan Bridgman, Windows XP Expert Zone Community Columnist
:

—Video at 56K over modems just wouldn't cut it in the quality department. DSL on both ends wouldn't be much better, with the 128K upstream limit common to the inexpensive DSL services available in our area. And T1s on both ends were out of the question for cost reasons. I've learned since that if bare copper pairs (such as the ones alarm companies use) were available from the phone company, we could have set up our own network. But they are in short supply in most cities.
...I started by copying an existing, high-quality profile and modifying it downwards. Two factors I considered carefully were frame rate and frame size, because these values dramatically affect the data rate. With a marginal connection, you have to be careful how much data you try to pass through it. Space must remain in the useable bandwidth for the inevitable packet retransmits.

e#3;
I dont get this part,

Quote :

I use two techniques to monitor the signal quality. The first is a simple command window with ping performing a repeated ping of his IP address. The second is a PerfMon (a performance counter used to monitor local or remote system performance) window showing the byte count being transmitted by the network adapter of the broadcast machine. I can watch how much data his Windows Media Player is pulling and see if it's getting into trouble.

...why would pinging a machine tell you how its performing?...would the ping itself not be reducing performance?

Quote :

Wireless LAN is less than perfect, so there are short dropouts from time to time. Luckily, they are usually only a few seconds, and Windows Media Player buffers about 30 seconds ahead, so it typically has a chance to recover the missed data before it's needed and Edward never notices a glitch

....and ^^ that means that the feed is not in real time

If you run linux on the PC, then you can use SSH if you are going to be encoding videos or something like that.