Just wanted to check something in case I've been mad all these years without knowing it. A few years ago I bought my main laptop secondhand. It came with a docking station. The default resolution is 1280x800 and it has a discrete nVidia card. It ran fine, relatively silent, using the nVidia driver. Initially I just used the dock for plugging in a mouse and saving unplugging the power, but then I got hold of a Samsung TV/monitor and full size keyboard. Since I sometimes take the laptop elsewhere I don't want to set the TV/monitor at a higher resolution (it can do 1080p) since I would then have to resize and readjust various elements all the time, plus it would demand much more of the graphics. So I simply mirror the 1280x800 output to the TV/monitor via the VGA output on the docking station. In KDE4 System Settings on openSUSE 13.1 I set this by overlaying the rectangle for LVDS-0 (the monitor inbuilt screen) on top of the rectangle for VGA-0. It works fine. However, the fan has become increasingly active and hence noisy over time. It and the heatsink have been thoroughly cleaned out and checked, especially since swapping the motherboard one time. Also, when sitting too long on the dock without discharging the battery that's not a good thing and it starts to lose peak capacity and make slight chugging noises to top up during standby, so it's good to do a full battery discharge/recharge now and then. What's more, resource demands are always getting bigger. It's an Intel Core Duo 2.4GHz laptop with 4GB RAM and an Intel SSD. I don't want to get into a debate about the specs. The point is, does setting screen mirroring in this way have to ramp up the graphics processing so much? It's effectively sending the same output image once, but to two display paths. Should that really entail so much overhead? My non-electronic-circuit-nerd logic would have assumed the processing is only done the once and the output is simply split, but the additional fan strain suggests this isn't how it works. Is there some other way to achieve screen mirroring more efficiently that I'm overlooking? gumb -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org