Docking station vs USB ports in the back of the monitor

Question

I am buying a 15" laptop and I need to have a desktop replacement. I therefore will buy a monitor, keyboard and mouse as well.

There is no docking station designed specifically for this model, so the only option I have is to buy one of these Stream-Video-Via-USB and Pray-Photoshop-Will-Work things. I prefer to connect two cables to laptop instead of one to get video streamed separately.

My questions are:

1. Is it possible to do this?
2. The monitor has built-in speakers and a HDMI port. Will the dual screen Windows 7 mode work if I connect it via HDMI rather than D-Sub or DVI port? The laptop has a dedicated NVIDIA GeForce graphics card.

Answer 1

My laptop has built-in HDMI (it's an ATI video card though, so some things might differ) and I have no problem hooking up to my LCD TV with it, and using it as an extended display (as opposed to a clone); it also works for audio without a problem (although the way Windows 7 works, it's a separate audio device, not just a clone of your speakers).

One caveat, it's possible, depending on the monitor and the laptop, that you might not get the same resolution on HDMI that you would using, say, DVI. Since my tests were with a TV (albeit one with VGA in) that has a native resolution very close to 720p hi-definition (1366x768 I believe), that's not something I can really check, compared to a monitor that would have, say, 1280x1024 resolution or higher. Basically, I would suggest checking the specs on the monitor, there should be some information there about the HDMI resolution. Technically, HDMI is almost identical to DVI, just with audio and other extras built-in, so it should handle whatever resolution it needs to.

tl;dr version: Yes, it should work fine, but you may get a lower/different resolution than with DVI.