theburner

Anyone have any advise about setting up a multi-monitor setup? Is it possible to have 2 monitors attached to one computer and actually multitask on both at the same time?
ie: Keep Outlook up in one window, while working with a DB in another?

Setup:
p4 3.4 HT
IC7-max3 mobo
2x WD 120 GB 7200 Sata
1x Maxtor 120 GB IDE
2x HP 19" Flat panel
Radeon 9200 128 MB Vid Card
1GB Matched Set Corsair (2x 512MB)
3 Opticals, 1 Floppy
XP Home Edition, but can buy Pro if I need to.

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Caphreak

thats exactly what i do, i dont have a 9200 pro, as long as you have dual video out youre fine (tv-out doesnt count)

the best way to do it is to install a program called UltraMon, it helps 10x with managing both monitors.

i dont have a setup close to yours, i needed to buy more ram cause i found myself having too many things running all at one time. i couldnt live without 2 monitors now.

sailor

Absolutely. I do it at home all the time. It works quite well, and is great for multitasking.

I dont really think you need a special program to do it, I just dropped another video card in the machine which Windows recognized and then let me choose which monitor to be primary. It was quite simple, really.

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merkerguitars

I set a stocktrader with a dual 17" LCD setup...he loves it. I would run it too if I could afford it. Next month he's going to have me build him another computer and he might run 4 19" LCD monitors

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theburner

HOw does the mouse work from screen to screen? Can you choose which window to open a program in?

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micah67

Windows XP can handle up to 7 monitors, I believe. I've got an extra video card in both my work and home systems.

When you right-click on the desktop and pull up properties, the "settings" tab will show both monitor (cards) you have in your box. Each window is numbered and you can position them in a virtual desktop. By tweaking the position, you can align things up very nicely.

Note the"Use this device as the primary" and "Extend my Windows" options when I have the second monitor selected:

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Confederate

all i did, was drop in another PCI car hooked up a monitor to it and used the extend my desktop function. Only problem I have is I can't seem to mix PCI with AGP

viper11885

As long as your video card has dual outputs or you use a pci video card, you can have a dual monitor setup.

viper11885

You just move it normally. When you want to go to the other screen, just move it in that directly and the mouse cursor will change to the other monitor.

sailor

Sure you can. Boot into your bios settings and somewhere in there is a place to tell it which to use as the primary card. Set that to your AGP and you should be fine.

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Wyodiver33

I have a 19 inch CRT and a 17 inch CRT being driven by a Radeon 9500 Pro. I love it. A good example of how dual monitors can be useful is moving MP3s to Nero. I keep Nero running on the 17" and move songs from the 19". Like somebody else stated above, once you get used to dual monitors, it's hard to go back to a single setup.

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Supradog

As long as you got semi stable drivers multimonitors is no problem. I ran 2pci tnt2 cards and a g2 pro agp car in win2k with no problems some years ago(2*17" and 1*19")

After that I've upgraded my hardware and run winxp on 2*19" on a ati 9700pro agp.

As long as you know what you're doing and not let the different pci cards mess around on the same irq with bad drivers it's no problem.

I did some testing pn how much resources it took to run a 2d desktop which updated with some numbers and a remote desktop session on the second screen while I played some regular games on the main screen.
The drop in fps and 3dmark scores with having the second screen on was between 1 and 2%.
Pretty interesting to see my netusage and ramload on the second screen while I game, different games behave differently.

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thencrow

I have a question about running multi monitors. I just bought a new monitor and set it up on my computer and everything works just fine. Except for when I play a game such as UT2004 it only shows up on one monitor, is their a way to get it to show up on both?

I am running windows xp all patches with an ATI Radeon 9600 pro

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KnifeMissile

As far as I know, you can't, thencrow.

At work, I run two 21" monitors (Sony Trinitron) with some sort of ATI card with dual outputs and full-screen applications (probably done through DirectX) don't use both monitors. I can see why they can't, too...

For all of you who have a dual setup, try this experiment. Take a window and move it around one monitor while being careful never to show any part of that window on the other monitor. Even on crappy video cards, the window movement should look smooth. Now, do the same on the other monitor. Again, it should still look smooth. Now, move the window quickly between monitors and see what kind of performance you get. It should suddenly become very choppy. This is especially pronounced if you run in a high resolution and you use a large window (I run at 1600x1200 on both monitors).
I believe the reason for this is that, while the video card probably supports hardware blitting (which enables images as big as a window to be copied quickly and, thus, moved smoothly), it can't possibly do so with another video card. At the very least, all that image data being copied must travel across the system bus to the other card. This happens even with my single video card with dual output because, I think, it's really just two video cards moulded together.

If simple blitting routines work this poorly across the bus (or, in my case, even within a single video card), imagine trying to support polygonal rendering! Or texture mapping! Or anything, really...

KnifeMissile

At home, I run a single 21" monitor and, unlike everyone else, I don't miss the dual monitor, much. Dual monitors are nice but I don't find it so indispensable... It's not as if you need dual monitors to multitask, right? I mean, one program can be busy while you're working in another and this is multitasking and this has nothing to do with your monitor(s), right?

Nocuous

Also if your video card has 1 vga and 1 dvi you can always get a cheap adapter to convert the dvi to vga giving you 2 vga ports for monitors. Depending on your card it might support using it as a multi-monitor setup. I know my radeon 9800 does.

It is nice to put the instant messaging programs on the second monitor while using the primary monitor for programming and playing games. lets you review the incoming messages without having to alt tab to see if it is worth while. But then again.. I stopped using multi-monitor awhile ago in favor of 2 machines.

cheesemoney

Well, how can you play games and use IM at the same time? When I am playing any game (given, they are full screen Open GL or D3D or whatever), I can't get any new data on my 2nd monitor. I can drag a mouse over, sure, but as soon as I click on the new screen I get the old -- game minimized to taskbar -- thingy.... and you know how unstable that can be (not very unstable for the games I've been playing lately, but I'm sure CS or BF1942 wouldn't like it very much).

canuckguy

just a bump on this thread, I have a ATI AIW 7500, using a flat screen now and have an extra monitor kicking about that I would like to use as a dual display-extended desktop.... any idea if i can just get an adapter to splitt the one card, or do i need a second video card to get dual setup?

Dilbert1234567

you need multiple heads on the card to display mutiple monitors (or multiple cards)

you cant realy split 1 into 2.

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canuckguy

cheers, just went out and got a cheap 8mb pci video card, gonna sticker in today.

viper11885

That's good enough

Done it before with my 8mb ATI Xpert 98 card and it worked out really well.

Xepidemic

its great to have dual monitors esp. when you are writing papers. i put word on one monitor and i could put an html document on another monitor. it really help alot so your not constantly switching windows around on one monitor. makes writing seem 10x faster!

canuckguy

just did it btw, now have two monitors with extended desktop, one is a 17" tft, the other is a 19"crt. very cool! to get it to work had to change from acpi uniprocessor to standard pc. well worth the troubleshooting. got a video playing on one, and surfing on the other.

Albinho

I have a video card that I have used dual displays with before but was wondering how/if I can have the same image be displayed on both monitors. Anyone know of a way?

I'm running a ATI Radeon 9000Pro on Windows XP.

namnori

Look for a clone mode. I think ATI has it, I know Matrox has one. IMO Matrox's multihead solutions are a lot nicer than what I've seen from ATI and Nvidia.