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Pimptastic

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 27, 2006
136
11
Up North, UK
Hi,

I have my 20" iMac intel Core Duo connected to my 42" plasma. This works great for when i want to watch movies on the plasma.

But...whenever the plasma is turned on, it seems that screen spanning is automatically enabled.

Is there a way to only have screen spanning enabled when i want to, not whenever the plasma is on.

On a side note, i guess having the screen spanning on takes up CPU time!?

Thanks
 

emw

macrumors G4
Aug 2, 2004
11,172
0
If you want to mirror the display instead of span it, that should be an option in the Displays Preference Pane. Meaning that the plasma and the iMac will show the same image. However, I'm not sure of the resolution difference - the picture on the plasma may suffer in mirrored mode.

I don't think spanning takes any more or less resources than mirroring, but I'm not positive.
 

Pimptastic

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 27, 2006
136
11
Up North, UK
Hi, thanks for the reply.

Basically, i want to be able to not send a signal to plasma. The only way to do this currently is disconecting the DVI cable.
 

emw

macrumors G4
Aug 2, 2004
11,172
0
Far as I know, if you don't want to see any signal on the plasma you need to either

(1) disconnect the cable, or

(2) go to a different input on the plasma

I don't think there's a way to shut off the video output once you've connected the DVI cable.
 

ViM

macrumors regular
Nov 7, 2006
119
0
Australia
So you can't watch a fullscreen movie on the iMac and have firefox open on the external monitor, without disconnecting the cable?
 

emw

macrumors G4
Aug 2, 2004
11,172
0
So you can't watch a fullscreen movie on the iMac and have firefox open on the external monitor, without disconnecting the cable?
Huh? My point was, if the iMac is connected to the TV, the TV (if switched to the iMac input) will show something, spanned or mirrored.

You couldn't show Firefox on the TV without the cable connected as there would be no signal.
 
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