Here’s how to add an extra monitor to a laptop that has only one DisplayPort, and already has an external display attached. QUESTION I would like to add an extra display to my laptop, which already has an external monitor attached. I’ve heard that it’s possible to connect more than one monitor to a single DisplayPort connector by ‘daisy chaining’ them, but I can’t find this feature on my existing display. Is there anything I can do, or will I need to replace my monitor? (See also: Use two monitors with one laptop.) HELPROOM ANSWER It’s still possible to connect multiple monitors, even without the daisy chaining feature, with a little extra hardware. First, your laptop will need to support DisplayPort in Multi-Stream Transport (MST) mode, if this is the case, then you can use a device such as Club 3D’s (club-3d.com) MST Hub to ‘split’ a single DisplayPort connection on your laptop into three individual DisplayPort sockets, each of which can then have its own monitor attached. The advantage of this approach is that you’ll be able to hook up your additional monitors with just a single cable connecting to your laptop. If your computer doesn’t support MST, then you could use a device such as Matrox’s DualHead2Go SE (tinyurl.com/q7qf3ye), which takes a single DisplayPort connection and splits it into a pair of DVI ports. This approach requires special software to manage your displays as they will appear to your laptop as a single ultra-wide display rather than as individual displays which can be managed by Windows. See all How to articles
