High Resolution, Low Price, DIY in Minutes

I am so freakin' jazzed about this. I use my new MBP (15", 2.53Ghz, 4GB, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M and 9600M GT PCI) at work and at home. At work I have two 22" LCD screens. I usually run one external LCD at 1680 x 1050 @ 60Hz via an Apple Mini Display Port to DVI dongle and then use the laptop built-in screen as my second monitor running at 1440 x 900 on a Ergotron Neo-Flex lift stand. This works well enough but I have always wanted to try using the second LCD in a vertical 1050 x 1680 resolution for all the materials that I have to write throughout the day. I searched several Mac forums and explored the solutions found there but few seemed to be very good meaning they all either didn't do the higher resolutions I needed or they relied on buggy drivers where everyone was posting all kinds of problems. Or they were outrageously expensive like running an external video card for $500. And to rub salt in my new MBP wounds it seems like no decent docking stations are available that had dual external DVI ports. I looked at a lot of options like an ExpressCard/34 to PCMCIA adapter, an ExpressCard/34 graphics adapter (imagine 3 graphics cards), running my Mini Display Port to a splitter box like the Matrox DualHead2Go box but it only supports 1024 in my setup, and a USB to DVI cable. I just tried the later. I decided on the ViBook Mac USB to DVI cable and just got it in the mail today. It's $140 via their website and it arrived in 3 days from ordering which made me giddy. I just hooked it up and it was simple and it works great! You install two drivers and reboot, then you plug the DVI end to your monitor and USB end to an open USB port. My MBP immediately recognized it, and recognized it as the correct monitor so I could edit the color profile, and it let me rotate it to 1050 x 1680 @ 60 Hz without a hiccup. Now I have 3 monitors (including the built-in 15" screen) all running independent of each other and all at different resolutions too. It's hard to believe! You can see the ViBook screen is slightly slower than the others to refresh when a whole screen redraw is involved but for all intents and purposes it is indistinguishable from a monitor on a video port. I am beside myself and thought that this happy little story might make a decent first Journal entry for me here on deviantART.

Here's a photograph of my desk with all three screens running: [link]

Here;s is a link to the ViBook product: [link]