Hey have any of you guys ever managed to get 2 monitors going at one time?

Factual Questions
1

if so HOW? I can get one to work or the other but the message on the second monitor is always the same.

"if you can read this message, windows has successfully initialized this display adapter.

to use this adapter as part of your windows desktop, open the display option in the control panel and adjust the settings on the settings tab"
the only option I can find relating to a second monitor is the one that says extend my desktop to this monitor.

the fing problem with that is that its on the WORKING MONITOR ALREADY!

throw me a bone here people, am I smoking crack or is this just a tad more difficult than it should be.

2

K. I have four monitors workig on my machine at work, and had two at home for a while. What os are you running? When you bring up the display properties, it should have a pulldown to select the video cards. That may be what your missing here. You select the other vid card, and hit extend your onto this monitor. Thats it.

3

I’ve often gotten a monitor and a TV going at once. My video card has multiple output ports.

Most fancy cards have extra drivers for such things. And Download.com has lots of specialized ones.

4

If you’ve gotten this far, you should be seeing, in the same window, a picture of two monitors side by side. The properties on the screen apply to the monitor that is currently selected. If you click on the other monitor icon, you should see that the “extend” checkbox isn’t checked. Check it and exit the “settings” window and you should be in business.

5

Actually, what you need to do, is go into (By right-clicking on an open part of your desktop and selecting ‘Properties’) ‘Display Properties’ and selecting the ‘Settings’ tab.

Once there, you should be given the option of two monitors.

At that point, click on the second monitor and click on whatever it is that says activate this monitor, or some such thing (My second one is currently off because I like to play games on the main monitor and it interferes with the second one.)

Anyrate, if you’ve gotten as far as the ‘If you can see this…’ message, you’re loaded for bear.

Once you’re done activating the new monitor, which amounts to basically clicking ‘O.K.’, you’re free to adjust the size and placement of the second monitor (To adjust the placement of the monitor, just click and drag it to where you want it to be).

After that, enjoy. There’s nothing like having a two-monitor set-up.

I’ll never go back, and I have no one to thank but the SDMB for making me make the switch.

You’re already at the hardest part- the getting the ‘If you can see this…’ screen, it’s all down-hill from here.

Good Luck!

6

ok I kinda got it working thanks to you guys.

Cnote hit it on the head, I was also haveing a conflict with a mem manager but got that solved.

the problem I have now is that my pc thinks the pos crappy vid card is the main card and my wonderful 4xagp nvidia gforce 2 is the backup and I cant get it to change…any suggestions?

7

Many Motherboards have a setting in the bios that lets you define weather the PCI or the AGP card is the primary.

8

I plugged a second monitor into an old Mac SE/30.
Worked fine instantly as two separate screens, though it took a bit of getting used to as the cursor moved from one screen to another.
Macs:)

9

You’re still in luck, Critical1.

The same thing happened to me. bdgr has the right approach in correcting it.

Get into the bios of your computer and find something called ‘Primary Graphics Aperature’.

In my case, it was in the bios (F2) in the advanced section titled ‘PCI/Plug and Play Setup’. Once there, click on ‘Primary Graphics Aperature’ and change the primary device to the Nvidia (The Nvidia card is more than likely AGP, from what you’ve described).

There’s no guarentee you’ll find that in the same place that I did, but that’s the setting you’re after.

bdgr nailed it… I’m simply expanding on what he said.

Again, good luck, you’re almost there. Tell us how you like it once you get it running correctly.

10

Yeah :smiley:

The procedure for doing this with a powerbook is: Plug in extra monitor.

Boot.

Enjoy.

That’s also the procedure if you shove an extra video card in your desktop Mac (assuming you bothered to install the drivers for it.)

11

Yeah, and also three. (My 7100 came with built-in support for 2 and then someone handed me an old NuBus 24-bit card, and I had a spare Sony monitor lying around, so I had a 3-monitor setup for a couple of years).

Never done 4. Only using two at the moment, but, then, it IS a laptop after all!

12

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT!
I got it to work with the agp as primary, after much hassle with my sound card everything seems to be working exept my icq…
“rate limit exceeded
please try to reconect in a few minutes”

every see that message?
btw Cnote you RULE, everyone had some good advice but you definitely made things clear.
gonna try and reinstall my icq, I wont get much chance to play with it til tonight but I have finally mangaged to get that damn network icon off my screen! ok only kinda but still.

thanks guys

13

I fookin LOVE IT! this is damn cool!

14

So with two monitors, I assume you can have two, say, webpages open at the same time, and use the “same” mouse cursor to run both of 'em?

Do you have two copies of the same desktop, or is one desktop stretched out over two screens? I assume you can have two programs running, one on each screen? And further, I assume you can drag-and-drop various things (text, for example) between screens? Can you have one program on two screens, say to have extra canvas space in Paintshop?

And, since this sounds pretty cool, does one need a special video card, or do most support two monitors? How can I tell if mine does?

15

Glad it worked, Critical1, especially when I got a key part of my explanation wrong- it’s not called the ‘Primary Display Aperture’, it’s named ‘Primary Display Adapter’, or some such thing. All I know is I initially got it wrong, and it could wrong still for all I know, but it was close enough.

Cool.

Now, to stave off your next question, ‘Why are my games playing on the second monitor’, or, ‘Why can’t I run games on my two monitor set up?’ the answer from what I know is, “Beats me, they just do. Or they did for me, at least.”

It took me a while to figure out a simple and easy way to disable the second monitor and get at my games. Some methods are a pain in the ass- disabling the second one from the settings box can get complicated (You have to re-set all the old settings and whatnot), and other methods are time consuming (In a relative kind of way).

So, the method I use when wanted to quickly shut ‘er off and/or turn ’er back on without having to recalibrate it, as it were, is this-

Right click My Comp, or whatever it is you’ve renamed it, and get into the device manager. From there, open, or expand, the display adapters list and look for the driver running your second monitor. Highlight it and then click properties. On the bottom, change the usage to ‘Exists in all hardware properties’ to the one above it, ‘Disable this device’.

Your monitor will shut off and you can play games at will.

When you want to re-activate it again, go back and reverse the last step. If everything is working well, it should turn the monitor back on and with the settings you had when you disabled it.

Simple and sweet! No re-boots, no reconfiguring crappola, none of it.

Again, glad it worked out for you. A second monitor will come in handy more than you think… besides, it makes it look like you’re involved in some serious research shit.

16

Don-

Experience has taught me that it’s a lot harder to try and explain it, rather than having a person simply see it. When you’d see it, you’d go, ‘Oh, cool!’. But explaining it, you’d think, ‘Huh?’ or, ‘Ahhh… yeah… great. So what else is new?’.

But I’ll try anyways….

Basically, what you have with a two-monitor set up is essentially more desktop space… that’s it. You’re desktop still looks the same and everything looks normal. What’s different is that you have this ‘area’ where you to drag and drop stuff off to. You can move your desktop icons over to the area, or you can have different windows sitting over there too i.e. a window open to dictionary.com. Whatever it is you want over there, you can have it there, it doesn’t matter.

How it looks is even harder to explain, or at least it is for me this early in the morning.

Picture it like sitting down to have dinner with one plate compared to two. With the one plate there’s only so much room to put things. If you have that second plate, however, you can put some bread over there, maybe some butter, whatever floats your boat- you don’t have to find space for it on only that one plate. That is, with the piece of bread, you don’t need to let it piggy-back on top of something else, or let it dangle on the side of bigger solo plate, you just toss it onto a plate of it’s own.

Operationally, whenever you feel the need to grab something from the second plate, you simply move your fork over there and get it. It’s the same thing but with the mouse instead of the fork. You move the icon around and over to the area where the desktop has been expanded, and keep on going, and poof, your icon now shows up on the second monitor.

Make any sense? Or am I getting carpal tunnel syndrome for no reason?

17

To speed the process up even more, you can just hit the windows key and pause at the same time to pop up the system properties dialogue without mucking around with the mouse. I use that short-cute a lot.

18

It either requires that you put in a second video card, or get a dual head card like the matrox dual head. If you had one, it would have two places to plug in monitors. not likely if you didnt go out of your way to buy one. Thing is, the second card doesnt have to be as expensive as your primary, since you arent going to be running games on the secondary. You also have to be running win98 or higher to make it work. Winnt will work, but both cards have to be identical. I have 4 monitors hooked up to my machine at work, which is a little overkill, but I am working on a setup for a presentation system at work that will have 6 monitors.

19

Six monitors?

Some bitch. I gotta get crackin’.

I missed the part where you asked what you need to have two running.

Just to add a bit, and hopefully give some people some ideas because I’ve gotten so much out of it, all told, the added monitor for me cost all of about sixty bucks.

What started the upgrade (Or whatever it is you call it, an addition?) process was me poking around the back of the computer and finding an added monitor plug.

Since I had an extra monitor sitting around, only temporarily until the GF moved out, I wanted to see what it would look like and how it worked.

But alas, it wasn’t an extra monitor terminal.

But it got me interested enough that I went up to the local somewhat cheesy used computer store and looked around for a cheapo video card. I found one for thirty bucks.

Cool.

Then came the monitor part. The cheesy computer store had nothing but crap, so I checked out e-bay. Incorporating some interesting bidding techniques, I was able to pick up a perfectly good Dell seventeen-incher for twenty bucks. After shipping, it was around thirty bucks all told.

So, with about sixty dollars invested, I fired it up and won’t go back unless I have to.

  • I realized, almost at the end of this note, that the chances of anyone finding that even remotely interesting are about nill. But what the hell, I’m going to hit submit anyways!
20

Can I have two monitors runing at different resolutions? Say a 17" at 1024x768 and a 15" at 800x600?