hi I'm Bertie Thompson I'm the founder
of pluggable technologies Windows 8.1
has a bunch of enhanced multi-monitor
features which are really great and
because we sell USB adapters that allow
you to connect multiple displays we
wanted to give you a chance to see
what's new in Windows 8.1 so I have a
laptop here and we've got a total of
eight monitors the laptop plus seven
additional ones so when you connect
monitors to Windows this way they're all
part of the same extended desktop so I
can drag Windows around here and do
something on this monitor which is
completely independent from something
that I would do on another monitor and
it's great it's great for information
workers programmers people who are
writing people who are trading stocks
anybody who deals with a lot of
information but in Windows 8 there was
some significant limitations basically
Metro and any Metro applications would
only work on a single monitor and
Windows 8.1 that limitations been lifted
and I wanted to show you how that works
but first how in the world did we get
all of these monitors connected up to a
single system in fact a single system
through a single USB 3 cable and the
answer is USB graphics adapters which
are some of our products so we have here
a seven port USB 3 hub and you can see
we're using every port on it and off of
that hub we've got four of our USB 3 VGA
adapters driving each of these 4 VGA
monitors and then this monitor that's in
portrait mode we have a USB 3 HDMI DVI
adapter and then this monitor here we
have running off a pluggable uga 3000
which is another different model of
graphics adapter and we have details on
the pluggable page about what all the
kind of technical differences are
between them but in short it's really
just what types of monitors they connect
to because there's a lot of different
connector types then this monitors
connected actually directly to the
laptop and you might notice that the
laptop is actually an Apple MacBook Air
it's running Windows 8 actually Windows
8.1 and if you stick around to the end
of the video in the description we'll
have a link to a further video that will
explain how we're doing this how we're
running Windows 8.1 on a MacBook Air
because it's actually through a USB
Drive that's there in the back ok so now
what is
actually new in Windows 8.1 so I can go
to the Start menu on a particular
display and I can pull up any kind of
application here and it comes up full
screen on that display as Metro apps do
but I can go over here and I can open an
entirely different full screen
application so really now multiple
monitors is useful in the Metro context
if I try to do that with just straight
Windows 8 Metro would have only been
able to in trying to use just a single
display and I can also mix regular
desktop applications like I'll open
I II here just on the desktop and so
this is the desktop version of IE and I
can drag that around and use it but you
know it can live alongside the Metro
applications in particular there's even
an interesting new functionality that
lets us take a metro application and
kind of dock it to the side and then I
can take a regular application up there
and dock that to the side so now we have
a regular application docked alongside
the Metro app so you know whether you
have you know kind of two monitors or
eight monitors like this you're able to
have a lot of applications running
simultaneously be able to use those
applications simultaneous are there
performance limitations when you're
running over USB definitely but it's not
kind of actually what you'd expect a USB
three is a five gigabit per second bus
and the only thing that gets sent over
USB in this case is the the pixels that
are changing the actual images that are
changing so USB is actually a little bit
less of a limitation and it's more of
making sure that you have a you know
modern PC we like to recommend you know
PC from last year to intel HD 4000
graphics but two or four core machines
something of that class or better that
kind of machine combined with Windows
8.1 lets you be hyper productive I'm
just going to open a whole bunch of
windows here you can see the the
background change there another kind of
cool feature with Windows 8.1 is they
have the concept of a desktop background
that spans all the displays so this is
actually a single image from their
beaches theme pack that is every time
the image changes it just kind of
spreads out over all the displays so
here's Windows 8.1 Start
menu on every screen the ability to have
Metro apps working on one screen or
multiple screens the ability to have
Metro and regular desktop apps working
side-by-side you know it's still windows
8 there's still you know if you don't
like Windows 8 there's still all of
those aspects here but basically use
with a multi monitor system is greatly
improved and in combination with the
great extensibility that you get with
USB adapters like this you can do some
pretty amazing things so that's it
thanks a lot you can see more
information including links to the
product in the description