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I have been looking on building a Vista Media Center as an appliance, with grunty CPU (Quad core with Q6600) and 4GB DDR2 ram. I will probably dedicate a CPU core and 1.5GB ram to run SBS2003 as VM. Now the GPU may not need to be grunty but Aero Glass enough. (Currently eyeing at Asus P5E-VM HDMI mobo), it has HDMI and VGA output.
My understanding of multimonitor support is that, you can either mirror, or extend desktop. With my XP experience, to display both on LCD TV (at 1366x768) and LCD monitor (at 1680x1050)... there's no agreeable resolution.
Ideally, I want the HDMI to connect to LCD TV, and VGA to LCD monitor, as far as I know, you cannot Vista Media Centre to display only on the ACTIVE screen. By ACTIVE I mean, the one that is on at the moment. Why this? Well say, I may be only want to operate on LCD TV, and firing up Media Center, I would hope it only show up on LCD TV. Should the LCD TV is off (on purpose) and I want to operate on the system as a PC, and would like to see Media Center can sense the LCD TV is off and redirect all output to just LCD monitor. (make sense? probably not.)
Is the Vista (and its hardware companion) smart enough to know what signal is on and active and what's not and switches dynamically to the right active connection? In very rare chance that both LCD TV and LCD monitor will concurrently on and active/operate. So it is mainly knowing/wanting the display driver to switch the primary screen automatically between higher and lower resolution output (of two different screen outputs on two different connections)
Or... am I just hoping too much into the future to see this happening?
