Who is ViDock Gfx for?

ViDock Gfx has been designed to offer a no-compromise feature set. This requires adequate support from both the notebook and the OS that are interacting with ViDock Gfx.

There are two main prerequisites that ViDock Gfx needs to work seamlessly in a system:

• Enough resources are allocated for the graphics memory.
  This depends on both the notebook's BIOS and the OS used.
• The OS supports the ViDock Gfx driver.
  This depends on the OS version and, for Windows Vista, also on the notebook's built in graphics card.

Operating system compatibility

Please find your system in the following table. 32 and 64 bit versions of any OS are supported and have the same level of compatibility.

Windows 7

ViDock Gfx is designed for Windows 7. Windows 7 in fact enables all the capabilities that make ViDock Gfx fully functional in term of compatibility and hot-pluggability (graceful removal still required) on any system.

Windows Vista

Windows Vista limits multi display support by allowing only one graphics driver running in the system. For this reason only systems featuring ATI graphics engines on the motherboard are supported, and systems running NVidia or Intel graphcis are not compatible.

Hot Plug is supported both in plug in and plug out (graceful removal is still required). And yes, Aero 3D accelerated interface is fully functional on all ViDock Gfx connected screens!

Both 32 bit and 64 bit version are supported.

Windows XP

Windows XP relies on the system BIOS for resource allocation. Even if PCMCIA specifications recommend honoring memory requirements of connected ExpressCard devices, some system BIOS may not allocate enough memory resources, making ViDock Gfx not compatible specifically on these not comforming systems.

For the same reason, the hot-plug functionality of ViDock Gfx is not supported with Windows XP. Therefore, you should expect to restart your system when you plug in or before plugging out ViDock Gfx.

If the BIOS is granting resources, both 32 bit and 64 bit version are supported.

In case you have problems with ViDock Gfx on a WinXP system, you can understand if you are having the BIOS resource allocation problem following the below instructions.

Start your system with ViBook plugged in. Click on the Start menu, choose Control Panel, double click on System, select the Hardware tab, click the Device Manager button, expand the Display Adapters node.
Double click on the item with a yellow exclamation mark on it, if any. If "This device cannot find enough free resources that it can use. (Code 12)" message will be displayed this confirms the BIOS resources allocation issue. See the the graphics on the right for a visual reference.

Mac OS X 10.5

ViDock Gfx Mac Edition is compatible only with MacBook Pro generation 1, 2 and 4.

Hot Plug is not supported due to Mac OS limitations, therefore the system must be fully powered off before plugging in or out ViDock Gfx.

Also on the generation 1, the internal graphics engine gets disabled when booting with ViDock Gfx, that means that only screens connected to ViDock Gfx are usable, not the notebook internal screen and it's DVI port.

The generation number can be retrived with Apple System Profiler tool, paying attention to the Model Identifier attribute, that is reported as MacBookProX,Y. The X value is the generation number. Latest MacBook Pro, called Unibody, is generation 5 and unfortunately it is not supported. See the the graphics on the right for a visual reference.

Linux

We are currently not supporting Linux system. We expect a certain compatibility level could be achieved by experienced Linux users. We expect to offer support for Linux in the future.

Compatible PC Systems

The following is an incomplete list of compatible and not compatible systems as reported from our sources and experiments. This may be a guide in understanding your system compatibility. Please report more success or un-success stories to our support channel.

Compatible Systems

Background

Here is some mildly technical information if you'd like to have a deeper understanding of the compatibility needs of ViDock Gfx.

Resource allocation

A modern graphics card can feature a significant amount of video memory. That memory must be addressable by the OS, so a part of the addressable space available must be reserved to interact with the device connected to the ExpressCard slot.

The BIOS is initially responsible for reserving addresses for the ExpressCard devices and the OS may be able to override that setting.

The ExpressCard specification requires the address space allocated to ExpressCard to be configurable. As often happens, not all notebook makers are implementing this feature in all their product line.

So it really depends on the specific notebook model, the BIOS version and the OS installed. Some hints that a system can correctly support ViDock Gfx are:

• It's a recent system
• The BIOS configuration panel is very detailed
• On Windows systems, you are using the Vista or Windows 7 version

Windows Vista

The new graphics architecture in Vista allows for only one WDDM (Windows Vista Display Driver Model) to be loaded in the system.

Since graphics chips (GPUs) from different manufacturers need different drivers, this means that in order to use a WDDM driver you must match the GPU of the notebook's built in graphics card to the ViDock Gfx's one.

For more information please look at this page from Microsoft.

Hot Plug/Unplug

Hot plug is an additional compatibility step: a system that can correctly work with ViDock Gfx after a cold boot may not be able to correctly hot plug/unplug ViDock Gfx.

This is mostly a resource allocation problem on Windows.

On Mac OS X, there are subtle OS limitations that come into play and do not allow for safe hot unplug.

WinXP BIOS resource allocation issue
Click to enlarge

MacOS X generation info
Click to enlarge

NOT Compatible Systems