Computers: Win98 - Dual Monitors

Factual Questions
1

It’s your friendly neighborhood chicken boy again, fresh from his flagship titles about technical support as well as successful spin-offs such as “To my computer: You suck” and the unpublished “Who wants to flush a sound card?”

Recently I was having some problems with my computer, found out it was the sound card. Sound card was replaced, and all is now well. With that said…

Since I had salvaged the the harddrive and soundcard from my old computer, I figured what the Hell and took the video capture card as well. My intent was to setup a dual monitor system.

So I plug in the extra card and hook up a second monitor. Computer boots up, monitor 1 goes through the BIOS, and then monitor 2 boots up with the capture card’s BIOS and says it’s been installed correctly, but I need to adjust the settings for multiple monitors. No biggie, right?

In display properties, it does not show two monitors. If I go to device manager, there’s a “!” on the primary video card. It’s functioning properly but it says that the area of memory normally used by the card is being used by another program. Other than that, no conflicts, but it won’t allow multi-display.

The suggestion given is to eliminated references to emm386 or other memory managers from my config.sys file. Well, I don’t have that listed. The config.sys in c:\ is blank, and the only other one in c:\windows\command\ebd has nothing of note.

Is there anyone who can help me out with this? I’ll be googling but I’ll probably online find setup info.

BTW: Both cards are ATI powered and PCI.

2

Try Google “dual monitors windows” and see what you can find. Since I don’t use a dual system, nor use Win98, I cannot reccommend any specific results from that search.

3

I wanted to do this at work (in Win98SE), and assumed it would be easy. Our tech looked into it and instead gave me a new machine with a Matrox Dual Head video card. I don’t know whether that means you need to something like that to get two monitors working.

4

I think the problem is that both cards are PCI. They’re probably both fighting for the primary position in Windows or the BIOS. See if your cards have a jumper to change this (I had a pair of Number Nine pci cards that did). Otherwise you may need to replace one with an AGP card.