For anyone using or planning to use the CablesToGo wireless USB to VGA (Trulink)

[3s-gtech]

Just been having great fun with my Trulink Wireless USB to VGA (with audio) units. For those of you with tablets or laptops where video needs to be mobile in a room, this may help.

 

The setup of the units is easy and fine. Download the software from CableToGo, install then plug in the USB unit. It'll complete, then run the Wirless Manager software. You then need to USB link the receiver and laptop to associate the two.

 

Now comes the fun. The unit will want to run at 1024x768, despite it 'supporting' much higher resolutions. On Windows 7 (both 32 and 64 bit) when you attempt to change the display settings to duplicate the screens, you'll get a Windows error message saying it's unable to save the configuration. You'll be stuck with the projector showing the extended desktop.

 

Go to the Displaylink website DisplayLink: Windows Software and download the newest version (this is not mentioned anywhere in the documentation that I've seen). Now install that. Suddenly, the whole thing will come to life - you can set cloned desktops, etc. You'll also find video playback greatly improves over wireless too.

 

We found that these units do not support video playback if the screen resolution is above 1024x768, despite claims of 720p. With an Nvidia chipset, even that was flaky. I have now swapped in a tablet with 1024x768 native resolution and Intel 945G, which seems to work fine.

 

Overall, the units aren't bad. The build quality of the USB unit is awful in the extreme - the case just falls off leaving the exposed board, but this could be superglued. Even better, build the circuit board into a PC Card slot (it's slim enough) so that it doesn't stick out so stupidly. However, the actual performance, with the right system setup, does the job.

 

Just a bit of info in case you plan to use them. If you already do, please share your thoughts - if I can improve the implementation, I will!

[Cache]

We use one of these on a Windows XP machine, but didn't realise there were updates available for the Software.

 

We have one small problem in that by default ours always seems to go to extend instead of duplicate by default and while it's just a simple switch to flick it, I'd much rather it do that by default - might try the updated software and see if it works any better.