I realised this morning that a large amount of my apartment is being wasted by the space-guzzling 19-inch CRT monitor that's hooked to my Windows box. I haven't used my Windows box for more than a few minutes at a time since... er... March? It would make far more sense to throw out the CRT monitor, get an external 17-inch LCD display and hook it up so I could share it between the Windows box (in those rare moments I use it), and the computer that gets most of my attention, my iMac.
(Switching to LCD would be necessary for aesthetic reasons. Putting the iMac next to that gigantic CRT screen would just look totally wrong.)
Except according to the guy in the shop, and confirmed by a quick Google search, the external monitor port on the iMac only supports mirroring desktops, not extending them. I'd assumed it would be like the Powerbook, and be able to do both.
Damnit. For the first time since buying the iMac in February, I have a reason to be disappointed in it. This is the first thing about the machine that hasn't "just worked" for me. Oh well, I guess seven months is a pretty long honeymoon.
Supopsedly, there's a fairly tricky hack you can do to some iBooks, iMacs, and eMacs to enable multiple monitors. It seems that the hardware is capable of it, but Apple crippled it to push users toward the higher end models if they wanted that feature.
http://www.rutemoeller.com/mp/ibook/ibook_e.html
http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/topic/13998-1.html
I haven't tried it, so who knows what it does. :)
Wow, thanks. I'll have to give that a try.