Review: Kensington Makes Dual Monitors Simple

Twice the viewing space means a person can see more data at once. It means a person can more quickly access multiple applications. It means a person can get more done. If you doubt this, try to find someone who has had multiple monitors attached to a PC and hasn't liked it. It's a good bet that won't be easy.

Component makers and PC manufacturers have acknowledged this by making it much easier to find snap-in video cards, or desktops and notebooks that support multiple LCDs. Peripheral-maker Kensington has acknowledged this, too, with its Dual Monitor Adapter for PCs -- a nifty peripheral that we've looked at in the Test Center lab.

The Dual Monitor Adapter, despite its unassuming product name, is just terrific. Street-priced at about $119, the device creates a second LCD port via USB 2.0 connection. Installation consists of loading the driver software, hooking up the USB device, and connecting the second LCD. That's it. We tried this on a custom-built PC running an Intel Core2 Quad Q6700 at 2.66 GHz, with on-board graphics, and 4 GB of memory.

The adapter features extended and mirrored desktop modes in Windows Vista, DVI-I and VGA input, and comes with a VGA adapter. Kensington says it works with Windows XP and Mac OSX 10.4.11 with downloaded beta drivers. (We only looked at it on Vista.)

We can easily recommend Kensington's Dual Monitor Adapter as a nice peripheral that can add value to a desktop.