2 computers 1 monitor

[Burning Phoenix]

Ok now begin slowly for i know nothing about networkg yet! I'm a fast learner so don't hold back on the terminology.
Here's my question.
I'm going to connect my main computer ; the one i'm using now ; to a almost finished 2. look in the sig for both specs. If you noticed i have not bought a new video card for the second one. The reason being is i want to know if the video card will make a difference on how i view things on the 2nd system through the main system's monitor. If not i'll just buy a cheap video card tomorrow for it that way i can buy a better one for the main. Keep in mind i have no intention on having a monitor, keyboard or mouse hooked to the 2nd system.

 

[flounder43]

Do you mean looking at the second computer through VNC, or something like that?

If you don't need it to do anything special, get a cheap one. All of my others (besides my main system) are cheapies...

 

[Burning Phoenix]

actaully i have downloaded VNC months ago for just this type of occasion but i was hoping windows xp file hsaring and remote access would somehow take it's place.
The thing is being that a cheap card installed on the 2nd would have a old driver probably limiting it's resolution so how would that affect my resolution on the primary systems monitor trying to view multiple running programs on the 2nd. Would i be able to view the 2nd systems desktop with higher resolution.

 

[Godfodda]

actaully i have downloaded VNC months ago for just this type of occasion but i was hoping windows xp file hsaring and remote access would somehow take it's place.
The thing is being that a cheap card installed on the 2nd would have a old driver probably limiting it's resolution so how would that affect my resolution on the primary systems monitor trying to view multiple running programs on the 2nd. Would i be able to view the 2nd systems desktop with higher resolution.

I use VNC to monitor 5 different PCs with all different kinds of vid cards. The only time I had any trouble was when I killed one of the vid cards and temporarily replaced it with a 1 meg ISA card. VNC didn't like dealing with that.

I'm assuming that it could deal with any "modern" video card. The worst one I have is an onboard 8 megger set to 640x480 and it has no problems. I'll bet that if I'd had the right drivers and settings, it would have been happy with the 1 megger.

You'll see the image on your screen as it would appear on the client's monitor... unless your monitor resolution is higher, then you'll see it in a window smaller than your screen.

 

[Burning Phoenix]

My resolution is set to 1280 x 1024 So i guess i better buy at least a video card that supports that. An AGP TNT maybe!

 

[Godfodda]

My resolution is set to 1280 x 1024 So i guess i better buy at least a video card that supports that. An AGP TNT maybe!

Are you planning on actually running anything on machine 2 or just using it as an extra "toy"? If it's just going to be an extra, high resolution wouldn't be necessary. I can see the 640x480 through VNC fine and I'm at the same monitor resolution as you.

If you're planning on running programs and fully utilizing machine 2, this may not be what you want to use. It's somewhat slow, and so I'm thinking games and the like wouldn't look or behave very well. Let me qualify that: it's somewhat slow here, but I'm using a 10Mb hub and I'm also thinking that ZoneAlarm interferes a little. Might be much faster if you're going to just run a cable between the two machines.

If you're still going to get a card that will handle high resolutions, check out partshelf. I got a TNT2 from them some time ago for $25, I think.

 

[thefly]

basically you get a striped down version of the desktop on the othermachine. It's not going to be high res. Typically pcanywhere disables the remotes desktop picture (background) to save bandwidth.

A cheapo card should work fine. I have noticed that some video card drivers don't play nice with pcanywhere. Sometimes you have to play with the resolution to see anything on a remote site.

Or update the drivers helps sometimes.