Plugable USB 2.0 to VGA Video Graphics Adapter for Multiple Monitors up to 1920x1080 Supports Windows 11,10, 8.1, 7, XP, Mac, and ChromeOS

I built a stock trading platform and was looking for a way to run multiple monitors off of my laptop. Based on the reviews I ordered two of these Plugable adapters. They are awesome. I am running Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate and had almost no problems getting these to work right out of the box. I did not even have to use the included CD.The only problem I ran into initially was that the laptop at first did not find the driver locally and did not give me an option to search the Internet for the driver. All you have to do if this happens is go into device manager, locate the device with the missing driver and click update driver. It will then ask if you wish to search the Internet automatically, click Yes and it will locate and install the right driver.The second adapter was even easier than the first, since it now had the driver it truly was plug and play. The additional monitors show up in the display control panel and you can use standard Windows 7 options to set them up.I am using 3 monitors all different models, two are 24" Dells (ST2410 & a 2405FPW) and one is a 19" Samsung. The display control panel even properly detects each monitor brand. One of the 24" Dells are connected to the laptop's built-in VGA port and the other two monitors are connected via the USB ports.I did not build the system for video, I was setting up a stock trading platform so most of my use is static web pages, a few dynamic charting programs, and stock tickers; nothing even remotely graphics intensive. But for the purposes of this review I decided to really push the video capabilities to the limit. During all of the tests below I had a stock ticker running, charting software open, and Firefox with 4 tabs open, as well as some misc folders minimized. Memory usage stayed pretty constant around 1.3GB throughout the tests.I tested running a full 1080p movie at full screen, first on the monitor that is connected to the VGA port and then on each of the USB connected monitors. The 1080p movie did play, the proc hovered between 70% and 97% and was choppy occasionally. It never locked up completely when using the native VGA port but it did lock up for approximately 5sec once when using the USB adapters.I then repeated the test with a full 720P movie at full screen. The movie played fine on all three monitors with some slight choppiness observed during action scenes.Lastly I tested a 480p movie. It played with absolutely no problems on all 3 screens. I decided to push my luck and play 3 480p movies at the same time. The proc stayed around 50% but none of the 3 movies were watchable. It was obvious this was due to a limitation of my video card and not the adapters.I would estimate the CPU overhead for these adapters is less than 3%, the GPU hit might be higher but I did not have tools handy to monitor that part. The coolest part of the test is that I was able to drag all 3 movies from one monitor to the next while it was playing without so much as dropping a frame.My setup:Platform: HP 8530PProcessor: Intel Core 2 Duo T9600 @ 2.8GHzMemory: 2G 800MHz FSBOS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64bitVideo Card: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650 with 256MB Dedicated video memoryVideo Player: VLC (Video LAN Client) v1.1.4Video Format: 720p and 1080p was WMV 480p was MOV (Note: I am not sure what codec was used)Conclusion: These adapters do exactly what they advertise, definitely worth every penny. The come with all of the connections you will need, to connect anything from VGA to HDMI, no need to buy anything else, but you must provide the cables to connect from the adapter to the display.Based on my testing and the vendor documentation you MUST have a good video card to get good results from these. Integrated Intel/Basic video cards just won't cut it. Even with my HD HW accelerated video card, it proved to be more of a bottleneck than the adapters. Also ensure you have the latest version of Direct X and your video card's drivers, because the GPU is where most of the processing for these adapters occurs. I am pretty sure if I had more dedicated video memory even the 1080p movie would have played fine.

I paired this with a wireless USB network hub from IOGEAR and driving a TCL LED HDTV at 768x1360.[[ASIN:B0058DN1Q4 IOGEAR Wireless 4-Port USB Sharing Station GUWIP204 (Black)]This pair works together nicely.I note that movies ported through USB this way are a bit choppy, the mouse as well if I am tying up USB with a movie. Note this is the roughest test I could possibly do with this - as the Pluggable box has a frame buffer in it and only pixel change information is sent via USB. On a movie, every pixel is constantly changing. Note too I conducted my tests using the Pluggable converter through the IOGear wireless port run as an ad-hoc network. Personally, I was amazed it worked at all... much less nearly full speed. For normal windows, it appears as if the secondary monitor was hardwired to the system.What I am trying to do is build a podium setup where I can do presentations without having any wires to the podium, as well as adapt to whatever display technology the venue uses. VGA is pretty common in the venues I have seen.Here's another nice thing about this Pluggable device.. it has a mini 5-pin USB jack for the USB connection, as well as your standard DB-15 VGA connector. It draws its power from USB, so there is no wall-wart to break or lose. The USB jack lets you disconnect all cabling from the box so you don't end up twisting the cable repeatedly at the same place which inevitably leads to broken cable. If you do succeed in breaking your USB cable, its the standard USB-A (Male) to USB-Mini 5-pin (male). One of the most common USB cables out there. I have left my box on for hours and was pleased to see it does NOT run hot. It should last a long time... probably longer than the computer I bought it for.Note I am still on a learning curve with the IOGear unit, as it has a few quirks I am learning how to work with, however this pluggable USB-VGA converter has been very resilient. I note that it has a frame buffer internal to it, so in the event it loses signal, it continues to display the last image info sent to it. Since it is powered from USB, if you are powering this through a powered hub and turn off the main computer, the pluggable continues to feed the last image in its buffer to the monitor. Keep this in mind if you want the monitor to auto poweroff on a loss-of-signal cue. You probably do not want to run this from a hub anyway as you will want full USB bandwidth for it. Personally, I consider the retention of image a nice feature as sometimes I may have need to put an image up onI noted during the testing with the wireless link, I caused dropouts and reconnects which the pluggable handled quite gracefully ( a USB memory chip and USB mouse did as well ). Thanks to its buffer, there was no abrupt tears or blanking of the picture during signal problems. The last good image stayed on the screen until new data arrived.I am running WIN7. Installation was a snap. Be online when you plug this adapter into your machine for the first time and Microsoft will recognize it and download the latest driver for you and ( with your admin password ) install it. If you can not get online or have an earlier version of windows, a CDROM of the driver is included with the package. My CDROM is still in its unopened package. They provide one sheet of instructions - and if you are running WIN7, and have read this far, you already know how to get it running. This is one of those designs that is so intuitive you know exactly what to do with it when you see it.I am very pleased with this. Most of all I am pleased with what I didn't get - lots of annoying and worrisome windows warning me of things I know nothing about... I have had this for two days now, and have gone from newbie to knowing what to do with this thing without one error window or bluescreen - and believe me I have done my share of plugging and unplugging things out of order. So far this has recovered gracefully from everything I have thrown at it.