Installation

Because of its all-in-one design, there's very little to do with installation, physically. You'll most likely spend the majority of your time with the software. Installation just involves connecting the cable to the 4-pin connector on the LCD unit, then connecting the other end's connectors into the serial and USB ports on the back of your computer. The drive bracket housing the LCD can then be installed in any 5.25" drive bay. As you'll note, the cables will have to be routed out through an open, spare expansion slot. No pass-through slot cover is provided, and it would have been nice if one was, just to keep the cables in line. With that said, installation is quick and painless, and shouldn't take more than a few minutes.

Can be housed in a 5.25" drive bay.

A slight bending in the drive bracket and PCB.

Tray Icon.

You can now boot up your computer, and install the LCD driver software. As mentioned before, you'll probably want to download the latest version from VLSystem's site to make you have a version where any known problems have been fixed. After installation, when the software has been started, its tray icon should show up in the systray. By default, the software places a link to the program in the startup menu, so if you want, you can easily stop it from running at startup. The setup page isn't too complicated; if the LCD doesn't work, make sure the COM port settings are configured correctly (19200bps 8-bit(full) 1-stop bit) as per VLSystem's specs for this unit.

VLSystem's own LCD software.

Setup page; The software supports a range of LCD's. (20x2 was used)

CPU/Memory info.

Each tab in the software corresponds to a different set of info that can be output to the LCD, and also has settings for that feature. For example, the CPU/RAM page will cycle through CPU utilization, Memory usage and Swap file usage in the specified time interval that you want. When you have this page/tab up, this is what will be displayed on the LCD. This feature is useful for situations where you are using a fullscreen program and can't monitor CPU utilization/Mem usage any other way. It's also useful should you have a server that isn't directly connected to a monitor. Winamp support is also included in this software, but to use it you must move or copy the winamp plugin files from the LCD software directory into Winamp's plugin directory, not a hard task if you've played with winamp plugins before. There's a few options with the winamp plugin: You can have the equalizer take up the top line, while the running time and scrolling song title are displayed below, or you can have the equalizer take up the entire LCD. There's also an option where the top line displays an EQ for the left channel, and the bottom shows the EQ for the right channel. All of these options are configured with the winamp plugin, not the LCD software. I found this a little weird. In the left below picture you'll also notice there seem to be two plugins for the LCD software; one, when run, will display the EQ on the screen as shown, while the other will not. I prefer the latter, as I don't like having the EQ on my monitor when it's on the LCD.

Winamp Plugin.

Winamp plugin setup.

MBM5 shared memory support.

MBM support is something that can't be left out of an LCD software program, and VLSystem's hasn't let us down here. Most people that would be interested in this LCD would probably also be interested in monitoring their system temperatures, so the two almost go hand-in-hand. This program supports reading values from the MBM5 shared memory, and can output Temps, Voltages or Fan speeds. Again, the cycle time between displayed values can be set to your liking.

System info.

"User" page.

New mail notification.

The system info page is a useful one, having the ability to output a variety of useful data, including OS version, uptime, drive space and even the application currently in focus on the screen. The "User" page could probably be the most useful feature of this software, however. Its name isn't too descriptive, but what it allows you to do is display information from all the other sections. Up to 8 sets of information can be displayed, and each is a sub-section of one of the feature tabs. For example, one section could be the "Temperatures" section of the MBM5 feature. With this feature, you can select exactly what info you want output from the various features of the software. You again set the cycle time between each set of data. Lastly, you can have the software check for new e-mail and notify you when it arrives.

One thing I did notice with this software was that it sometimes wouldn't save my settings, especially the cycle times on various pages. This was with the latest version as of the writing of this review, 1.3. However, I didn't notice any other problems or did it crash on me while I was using it.

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