Dual Monitors for MacBook Pro using Diamond USB Display Adapter

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I was sharing the new Diamond BVU195 HD Display Adaptor I bought last week.

Today I set it up and it took less than 15 mins 🙂

Firstly, I attached an old DVI cable to the Diamond USB adaptor:
Diamond BVU195 HD USB Display Adapter

Then I plug in the Diamond adapter to the MacBook Pro USB port via the supplied USB cable:
Diamond BVU195 HD USB Display Adapter

At this point, NOTHING will happen on your Mac. Which is good (rather than like Windows.. it will probably attempt to install a driver, which might or might not work or the cryptic Windows cannot detect your hardware. ba ba ba).

Go to Mac download section of the DisplayLink web site and I downloaded the Lion version of the driver.

Diamond BVU195 HD USB Display Adapter

And installation takes place and then a REBOOT takes place:

Diamond BVU195 HD USB Display Adapter

On my second monitor, I changed the display to the DVI selection mode (I was using HDMI for my PC). Er.. nothing happens.. I then go to SYSTEM PREFERENCES and DISPLAY.

This is the initial setting. The menu bar will show you where your active monitor is. But my 2nd monitor is to my RIGHT and not my LEFT.

Diamond BVU195 HD USB Display Adapter

So I moved it to the right.
Diamond BVU195 HD USB Display Adapter

I select the MIRROR display and then viola ! I got 2 screens working. A mirrored image !
Diamond BVU195 HD USB Display Adapter

Diamond BVU195 HD USB Display Adapter

Playtime.. I try to move a Chrome browser window from left to right and it worked 🙂

Moving a window from left to the right monitor
Diamond BVU195 HD USB Display Adapter

Using Mac on the 2 monitors.
Diamond BVU195 HD USB Display Adapter

Okie. this is fun and all good but my real purpose is to run VMWare Fusion (and hence Windows 7) on the 2nd monitor. Does it work, man….

So first I run the VMWare Fusion and of course it is on my original monitor. I reduce it to a Unity window and was able to move it from the left to the right..
Diamond BVU195 HD USB Display Adapter

When it is on the right, I then select FULL WINDOW on the VMWare Fusion menu and viola.. a Full Windows 7 screen:
Diamond BVU195 HD USB Display Adapter

It works ! It works ! Now I can run Mac OS on the left monitor and run the Windows 7 (running on VMWare Fusion as a virtual machine) on the right.. BRILLIANT.

Left side is Mac OS and right side is the MT4 forex trading platform running on Windows 7
Diamond BVU195 HD USB Display Adapter

Left side is Caffeinated app (a brilliant RSS reader on Mac..) and the right hand side is Metastock running on Windows 7
Diamond BVU195 HD USB Display Adapter

The performance is not bad too… YES, there is a definite (and noticeable) performance impact in the mouse being laggy in the Windows part (quite noticeable) as compared to the Mac part (even the Mac part has a bit of impact too as compared to before but not too bad at all). I attributed it to the “older” Mac that I am running (already 3 years old) and also the fact that the display adaptor is not perfect…

But nothing you cannot live with.. Worth the $$$.. 🙂

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