Oh, and in my other technological development, I was inspired to solve a problem I've had in my appraisal for a couple of years now.

I've long wanted a second monitor for extra screen real estate - working on documents and web pages and other things all simultaneously. Would be great.

A snag I realized recently would be that it wasn't just the cost of new monitor that would be a stumbling block. I needed a dual graphics card on the PC as well. I don't have one.

However, the light dawned today, my *laptop* does! If the monitor I have has two inputs I may be able to reverse the idea of using my PC as the main screen and use it as the extension. I nabbed a cable from one of our techie guys and after a little bit of fiddling (mainly because I had to tell the PC monitor it no longer needed to display the PC desktop), got it working a treat.

Couple of kinks - can't print to my local printer as my laptop can only print to a networked printer. Have to switch the monitor manually each time. Email behaves in a way that makes it only usable on the primary screen. But nothing unmanageable and at zero cost may yet please the boss! Be interesting to see how useful it actually is.