There is an iPad app called Air Display which turns your iPad into a wireless second monitor for your computer. I haven't personally tried it so I can't vouch for its effectiveness, and I assume it has a significant amount of lag, but I think it would be very useful to toss something for reference onto the iPad screen and then work on your laptop screen. For example if you were writing a research paper you could find something useful in the browser, then toss it over to the iPad screen and type in Word on your main screen.
When I see this sort of thing I wonder how they implement it. Where do I even begin learning this, for Windows 7? I have some C experience and some C++ experience, and a little Win32 experience. I'm guessing they have to develop a virtual driver of some sort which tricks Windows into thinking a second monitor is attached, and then pipe the display over wireless to the iPad where an iPad app displays it on the screen.
So I assume I would have to write a Display Adapter driver, right? Where do I go to learn how to do so? Are there specs on such a thing? I think I can figure the rest out, but I guess the mysterious part is how to write a driver to trick Windows into thinking my application is a second monitor, and grabbing the pixels from applications in the virtual second monitor.
Can you start me off with some resources on creating drivers or something?