Yesterday I found an intact-looking, nice (if a couple years old) 17" KDS monitor on the floor of my apartment’s trash room while taking out the trash. I took it back in, plugged it in to my IBM ThinkPad, and figured out how to extend my desktop onto it. It looks great, and now I’ve got both screens covered with Firefox.
Here’s my question: What awesome things can I do now with two monitors in Windows XP Pro, and how can I do them? Here are some of the specifics I want to do:
[ul]
[li]Have my desktop icons on both monitors.[/li][li]Be able to open a program on the second monitor, rather than having it open in the first one, then having to un-maximize it and move it over to the second monitor.[/li][li]Have a start bar on each monitor.[/li][/ul]
If you have an nVidia video card in your laptop, you can download their nView program which enables all the stuff you want to happen. I believe it’s included in their latest driver downloads, which you can get at www.nvidia.com.
Be careful with your 2nd wish - you may not always be connected to your 2nd monitor, and it’s a small pain to get the application back over to your laptop’s screen using nView.
Here’s another thing I want to do: run Media Player or Winamp’s visualizer full-screen on both monitors at the same time. One thing I can do with Media Player already that’s pretty awesome is run the visualizer full-screen in the second monitor and then pull the actual window–with all the controls and playlist etc.–back onto the other monitor, so I can fiddle with Media Player while still having a full-screen viz. Pretty rad, but I can’t do it in Winamp; the visualizer is happy running in a window on either screen, of course, but if I put it in full-screen it goes up on the first monitor, and shoves part of the background (in this case, Firefox) onto the second monitor, so that the second monitor is actually showing 1.2 screens. Any ideas?
Does it really? I knew it had those awful, frustrating program windows, but are you saying you can’t just drag them to whatever monitor you wish without un-maximizing them first?
Bad enough that you can’t drag just one document window to another monitor and leave the other documents of that program where they are…
I have a two-monitor setup under XP Pro SP2, running off an ATI Radeon 9000. I started Photoshop. It opened its window in the left monitor; I dragged the window to the right monitor, then shut the program down. When I restarted Photoshop, it opened in the right monitor.
Isn’t there a setting that says, “Open windows where they were last closed”, or something similar?
Unwahed brain makes a good suggestion, that the nvidia software offers some of what you’re asking for - particularly, it adds buttons to the title bar which include one to move the window to another window, and a ‘throw window’ tool, where you can ‘grab’ a small window and fling it in the direction of another monitor, and it’ll continue its journey. Easier demonstrated than described!
Icons on both monitors? What Windows’ standard multi-monitor display entails is a desktop which stretches across the monitors. So your icons will only appear on one screen (it’d be easy to create a load of shortcuts from the other screen, though). Plus, you can only have one start menu & taskbar. And there’s bugs in the way the start bar works if different monitors are set to different resolutions.
The ‘awesome’ things you can do are actually the simple things. Like type a reply to an email, while referring to a web page, without having to alt-tab between the two. Or messing around with Winamp playlists while also moving files around in Windows Explorer, all full-screen.
You could try the ATI Catalyst control center - download and install the latest ATI Radeon package that includes it (not just the WDM stuff).
I run that at work to enable dual-monitor support in Win2k with my new LCD monitor and an old CRT I found in the supply room. You can get it to stretch the desktop across two monitors, put icons anywhere on the uber-wide desktop, and the start bar will run the length of the desktop.
I’d like to upgrade to XP Pro though, 'cause I’d rather things work the way they do with that, instead of in 2k.
You can’t? Oh, if we didn’t live in a Microsoft world…
Yeah, that’s actually the question I’m asking.
I’ll have to see what I can do with this, though. I can’t run the second monitor again tonight because I was stealing the power cable from the fax machine. I’ll get a new one, though, tomorrow, and see what I can do then.
Which is great, except I have an ATI.
Yeah, you’re right about that–get yourself XP.
Thanks for the link. My desktop already stretches and I can already put icons anywhere I want. The start bar stretching is nice, but can you open the start menu on the second monitor and use it to open programs on that side? That’s what I want.
It should be mentioned that the nVidia software has a “clone” mode for displaying the same thing on both monitors. I use it in my classroom so I can sit at my desk demoing something, while it also shows on the digital projector.
The general default for Windows programs is that they appear with their window size, maximized/minimized status, and position on the desktop set to wherever you last left them.
So once you have you extended desktop created, you should be able to position your programs where you want on either monitor and have them appear in the same place and size next time you open them.
However, this is actually controlled by the application, not by Windows, and so is under the control of the application developer, (which, IMHO is the right place for it) not Microsoft.
So different applications may behave differently (IE seems particularly frustrating at this to me). But most Windows programs behave pretty well in this regard.
I have an ATI card running the ATI dual-monitor software on two 17" monitors. They are set to the same resolution (they are identical monitors, bought just for the purpose) but I only have the taskbar set to the first monitor. You can spread icons out but (at least with what I’m running) sometimes when particular sorts of OS errors occur, any icons on the second monitor will get thrown back on the first monitor after you reboot, so I don’t usually leave any icons on the second monitor at all. And my wallpapers are black! To avoid any distractions when gaming in the dark. Dual monitors are great for working but I don’t use them a whole lot for anything else (gaming or surfing).
…Regarding the “open a window where it was last closed” thing, most programs will remember where they were last used and start up there but some programs will not, no matter what. They will even start up maximized across both monitors if that was how they were closed.
—Most all major programs will remember: Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, Adobe (Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, LiveMotion, ect), Paint Shop Pro, Cakewalk Home Studio and Pyro, and so on.
—DirectX-based games always start up on the main monitor (I have no games that can use both monitors).
—In fact it’s easier to just list the ones that won’t remember: two are SoulSeek (P2P/file trading) and the PlayCenter media player program that comes with the old SoundBlaster soundcards.
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