Innobec’s Sidewinder
The little window that could…
Great workaround for accessing a PC without the need for a display.
works flawlessly on my old Dell Axim X5 (300mhz) and my AMD mobo. This solution is cheaper then a new LCD panel and fits my needs! Cheaper only because my Axim is ‘retired’ and it was purchased dirt-cheap and used… Innobec has recently dropped the price down to $14.95.
Of all the various media players I could only get the new Quicktime to run video on the Sidewindow display – Divx, Windows Mediaplayer 9, Zoom would display an error message or show a black box. It might be an issue w/my graphics card but everything else is working just great with this product. Will probably check out support or the rest of the forum to see if there’s a workaround – although I’m not really planning on viewing video on the Sidewinder side of things…
I was hoping to mirror the desktop with this and I understand it’s not supported but I managed to use a workaround that fits my needs – Microsoft’s Accessibility Magnify tool.
I make the magnify tool full screen on the Sidewinder window at 800×600 resolution on the Sidewinder viewing area… I am able to get very smooth viewing of the main desktop on the Sidewindow display. At magnifications 2-9 I’m able to pan very quickly and run programs or view webpages… for some reason at magnification level 1 the mouse cursor disappears on the Sidewindow/Magnify screen. Performance hit isn’t too bad (~35% cpu usage). It spikes if there is fast movement across the screen, which is probably due more to the magnifier software then the Sidewindow app. I get pretty smooth performance even with iTunes or a Divx movie playing in the background – I am currently typing this while watching Cars trailer.
I’m also running Sidewindow as a controller/viewer for a PVR system in the living room. So I have one port on the graphics card video mapping to the TV and then the Sidewinder software to view the desktop of the CPU w/o the need for any LCD or CRT in the room. It allows me to quickly run video/shows withought getting out of the fullscreen view mode TV.
It’s also a great use for X-10 control panel and Flash slideshow of the family album… had to use Flash because the slideshow programs (Microsoft’s PictureView and Adobe’s Album) ran the slideshow only on the main monitor and not on the Sidewindow display.
This post is tagged: new media, software