Someone here must have a solution for this.

At work we have industrial p.cs with no monitors attched. When there is a problem remotely accessing a p.c or BIOS changes need to be made I need to go find a monitor and plug it in. It would be nice if there was some way to plug into the laptop and have a window display. Quality does not need to be excellent as its only for tweaking. Any ideas how to do this?

never mind

Remote desktop if they are on a network

Ahhhh read the op!!!

Have a look at ip kvm. I used an avocent 1010 ages ago and it worked well getting to bios and boot level. Im sure they have much imporved models. I presume the pc isnt a server machine with lights out type functionality. A remote power bar might be worth considering too for remote reboots

DVI only with no VGA?

This would work if VGA works (or you can use an adaptor), not cheap though. http://www.startech.com/uk/m/Server-Management/KVM-Switches/Portable-USB-PS-2-KVM-Console-Adapter-for-Notebook-PCs~NOTECONS01

@simon g that looks like the job. Was not expecting it to be as expensive! It more a solution to make my life easier there than company solution.

@cheeckymonkey888 I’ve used synergy before but doing some googling is appear ipkvm that give BIOS access require a new card http://okvm.sourceforge.net/kvmoverip.html due to the application of these IPCs I could not add in hardware.

That looks like the job. Was not expecting it to be as expensive!

Yeah. I looked into this a while back as I had the notion of turning an old laptop into a ‘crash cart’ KVM – a portable keyboard and screen that I could use in server rooms. The only options I found were prohibitively expensive.

I suppose it’d be possible to cannibalise an old machine to make something using the parts, but that’s beyond my knowledge of electrickery. If you do find a solution I’d be interested to hear it.

Now, you know me – bullshitter at best when it comes to computers

… but a while ago I was looking for something else and found

http://www.maxivista.com/how-to-use-laptop-as-monitor.htm

I have no bloody idea what it does, or whether it does it well

Problem with that is, you need to install software onto the machine you’re connecting to. Might help the OP but it wouldn’t be of any use to me in someone else’s data centre.

Yes, it’s something I thought should exist but probably not a big enough market for them. In datacentres they have “crash carts” with monitor, keyboard, etc that you wheel off to whichever server needs attention and plug in. But the built in management on servers now means many of them go their entire working life without ever needing a monitor to be plugged in.

Same as cougar no good if it needs extra software on the machine to access.

On well, what I thought as an easy solution seems not to be unless you want to spend waste.

Nah, it’s just a specialist bit of kit that needs a fair bit of hardware to do.

If it saves you time (or gets an important system up and running faster) and your time isn’t free then there must be a point where it’s worth your employer buying it for you?

Could use a laptop with HDMI in, pretty rare though and you still need mouse and keyboard.a

I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a thing.

My Alienware m17x has it.

Gosh. Ok, that’s the first one I’ve heard of.

You want a USB3 capture card, something like:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/StarTech-USB-Video-Capture-Device/dp/B00PC5HUA6

(first google hit).

Then just monitor what it records with VLC/whatever, don’t actually record it.

No sure what latency will be like, but check reviews etc, must be something that’ll do what you want.

Pre twitch etc. integration into modern consoles this was how folk captured stuff for streaming.

We had a similar issue with our CCTV PC’s

I ended up mounting a small LCD monitor in a flight case with a USB keyboard/rollerball combo in the bottom half.

You can make it as pretty or as ghetto as you like. Mine wasn’t pretty, but it worked, and was easy to cart around.