Transform Your Old Mac into a Second Screen

Nicole Martinelli ()

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If you feel there’s no such thing as too much screen real estate, you might want to recycle your old Mac as a display for your laptop.

Popular Mechanics suggests downloading  ScreenRecycler (there’s a gratis or $29 version) a driver that creates a virtual display that is then shared via VNC so you can multitask with two displays.
You can even use an old PC monitor (gasp!) for display as long as the main computer’s a Mac.
As someone who tends to keep old machines around long after they’re useful, I love this idea.

Anyone tried it?

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Via Popular Mechanics

4 comments »

About the author

nicole_martinelli

Nicole Martinelli is a San Francisco native who has lived in Milan and Florence, Italy. She's written for Wired.com, The New York Times and Newsweek. You can find her on Twitter , Facebook and Google+.

If you're doing something new/cool that's Apple related, email her about it.

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Posted in How-To |

  • http://www.atrishq.com Mason Taylor

    I used Screen Recycler with JollysFastVNC for a couple of months with my old Powerbook G4 and it was fantastic until the powerbook died :) I’d highly recommend people checking this out it’s a really handy green solution. Thanks for giving it some visibility!

  • http://www.informationweek.com Mitch Wagner

    Hi, Nicole—I’ve been using ScreenRecycler for about a month now; it works great. I wrote it up here:

    http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/reviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=218600003&subSection=News

    Mitch Wagner
    InformationWeek.com

  • Shawn Pero

    Does anyone know if there’s a way to use this with a Mac mini?

  • Martha

    I downloaded it and a dialog box came up that said “did you ever fart so hard you ended up in another zip code?” Is that a VNC error?