External Laptop Video Cards

Hello,

I have an Xbox 360 outputting a VGA signal. Currently, it is plugged into a switch and sharing a standard aspect ratio flatscreen monitor with my PC. While the setup works pretty well, I've been tempted to swap out my monitor for a cheap 19-inch widescreen monitor. However, it occured to me that my laptop (a Toshiba M35X-S161) has a widescreen monitor that I could use. My laptop does not have a VGA input, but it does have USB 2.0 ports, a firewire port, and a PCMCIA port.

Does anyone know of an external card (cheaper than the linked monitor) that accepts a VGA input (and connects to one of the previously mentioned available ports) that would allow me to use my laptop as my 360 monitor?

Pfft weakling!

Not possibile for HD or VGA using those connection methods. There are PCI/PCI-X/PCIe solutions, but you wouldn't want those anyways due to their capture/display characteristics which are also not conducive to gaming.

Simply put the answer is 'not worth the hassle'. The only external input you can get using PCMCI/USB/FireWire is S-video/Coax in using a ViVo or Tuner card. These may sound like a good idea, but they have a slight lag, which is not an issue when watching video (since the audio and video are synched up with the lag), but you would find that your controls seems to be slightly behind the displayed image.

Simply put using your laptop as an Xbox monitor doesn't work well at all, and the solution would cost you about $100, so you might as well put that towards either a cheap monitor or cheap TV (a 27" CRT will look better than an SDTV signal on your non-native LCD even if you didn't have the lag issue). VGA in not an option, not without cracking the case and splicing into the LCd itself (good luck with the pinouts [I speak from experience, it's totally different]).

Go out and get a cheap 25-32" APEX style/quality TV or get a good extra monitor (CRT or LCD) that you can actually use for something other than the Xbox as well. Those are your two best solutions for you.