Village Tronic ViBook

DisplayLink has been around for a while now, but no-one seems to be shouting about it much. We're not quite sure why, as it's an ingenious concept - allowing a second, third and up to eight monitors to be added to systems via the USB interface.

Most implementations of DisplayLink we've seen have been built into monitors themselves - but the ViBook is different. It's a simple add-on that lets you turn any monitor into a DisplayLink-capable screen.

It's a pretty elegant solution, too. The main device is the size of a pack of cards, it has a 1.5m long USB cable trailing from one end and a DVI socket on the other side, and in the box is a stubby DVI to VGA adapter and a VESA standard mount that enables the box to be clipped neatly to the rear of your monitor.

You can use the system to power (theoretically) up to six extra displays in addition to your main display(s), with one adapter required for each monitor. Impressively, screens up to 1,680 x 1,050 or 1,600 x 1,200 in resolution are also supported, though we suspect that RAM and processing power will be limiting factors here.

The device also comes with monitor management software that allows you to not only quickly change colour settings, resolution, rotation and alter screen arrangement, but also pops a pair of new buttons into the title bar of most Windows applications.

These buttons allow you to expand windows the full width of all your screens (exceptionally handy for large spreadsheets), and to relocate applications from one monitor to another instantly.

Best of all, though, the system works perfectly. You won't be playing games on it, or watching iPlayer or YouTube video full screen - the bandwidth just isn't high enough - but for documents, email, general web browsing we have no complaint. There's no lag to speak of with the mouse cursor and the image quality is fine.

It's quite expensive, especially considering that you can buy a whole new 19 or 20in monitor for the same money. But if you need the extra desktop real estate and don't have any way of adding extra ports to your current system, it's a very elegant and effective way of going about it.

Author: Jonathan Bray