Does Windows 7 make Presentation Director obsolete?

[Steve06]

Hi folks,
I use my T61 in different screen setups on a daily basis: At home, it is connected through DVI (Mini dock) to an Eizo 22" screen (1680x1050 res.), at work it is connected via VGA to another TFT (1280x1024), sometimes I do presentations via a projector (1024x768) and so on.
Sometimes I like to use only one screen at a time, sometimes I need the extended desktop, depending on what work there is to be done.

I used to have different Presentation Director profiles for each of these scenarios. Now I read on http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=270 that Lenovo will discontinue Presentation Director on Windows 7 for the reason that Windows 7's new functionality would make it obsolete and not justify further efforts to keep it updated.

Presentation Director – This is probably the most controversial of the tools we are not porting over to work on Windows 7. The reason is that Windows has much improved external projector/display capabilities and configures many things automatically. There are a few features that we wish Microsoft would have incorporated from our tool, but they aren’t enough to justify the development expense of continuing to update this tool.

My problem is: I have not found any way to save different profiles for each of my work environments under Windows 7's display/screen resolution settings. Thus, I don't see how Windows 7 could make off for the missing Presentation Director application.
Since I'm quite new to Win 7, I might have overlooked some feature, but as it stands, every time I change my location, I have to readjust all the screen settings.

I'm curious to hear other Lenovo/Windows 7 user's opinions and experiences.

Best wishes,
Steve

[Dummvogel]

Windows 7 saves the Display config for each display separately. So if you connect your Eizo, it should reset everything as is was the last time it was connected. This works here.

Also you can press Win+P to switch between clone, extend and single display. I don't miss PD, even though I use very different Screen configs.

[victort]

Hi guys, please help me as I'm a newbie here. it's about missing PD on Windows7 too.

(1). How can I configure the PD to extend the external monitor to the left? It is because sometimes I sit on a meeting and the projector/LCD is on my left. And on the next meeting, probably the projector/LCD on my right, depends on which side of the table I sit.
I would like to save it as a profile not every time configure it. It's painful to let people waiting and watching what I'm doing.

(2). How I can force the external monitor, so the external monitor can use the resolution I prefer to have. With old PD under Vista, I can set the external LCD to 1024x768 if I use extended monitor and 1280x800 if I use clone mode.
Now under Windows 7, if I choose 1280x800 in clone, the external dispaly will blank. And if I choose 1024x768 in clone mode, the display on thinkpad will be pressed and the edges are black.

Thank you for any help.

[tannerj]

Presentation Director isn't continued for Windows 7 by Lenovo. My experience with external displays is so far limited to use with my T43p and it's docking station. The biggest complaint I had is that I no longer had a way to set the position of the displays. It also didn't handle docking the laptop while running and activating the external display anywhere near as well as it did in XP.

These complaints aside, Windows 7's handling of multiple displays is by far improved over XP/Vista. It's quite possible the lacking functionality I experienced should be addressed by the video driver, but the driver for the T43p's ATI FireGL for 7 didn't make up for this lost functionality.

I've run the Presentation Director for Vista on 7, it does work to some extent, and even helped take care of the docking issues.