Rather than forking out for a whole base unit which would include a case, PSU, motherboard, processor, memory, graphics and sound card, you instead use your existing processor cycles and memory to power a second user on the same machine. Such concepts are not new to the Unix community, including Linux PC users, where X11 displays have been around longer than PCs themselves. I tried various applications from simple text editors all the way up to the Quake 3 demo. However, for joint use of a Web browser, or of e-mail, or of less demanding Windows apps such as MS Word , the system coped admirably. The graphics aren't TNT quality, but they're good enough.
Installation is fairly simple.
Just plug the card into a spare PCI slot as per any other PCI card, then follow the very well-described instructions in the manual to add the new drivers. After a week of testing the card, it was good to see that it also uninstalled very cleanly. This is useful as your main PC then performs as normal until you enable the second desktop. The only difference is that the PC runs a S3DM.EXE driver that, presumably, manages the second S3 display. The main problem, especially on the second desktop, is load times, which are slow, presumably because the drives are shared between users.