I’m currently running dual monitors on my PC, and it’s all working out fine. Except that if I run a full-screen game, in this case Civilization IV, and switch to a window on the other monitor, Civ IV will minimise, and the computer will spazz out briefly, as it sorts itself out. This isn’t really that significant a problem, but it is annoying, and I was wondering if there was some way to stop this from happening? It’s conceivable I don’t have my monitors set up correctly.
No, not really. Some games handle it better than others (usually by forcing the cursor to stay in the full-screen monitor. For the ones that don’t, I usually just go to the screen preferences and turn off the second monitor while I play.
Luckily, more games are getting this right these days. I actually have more problems with things like Microsoft’s development tools, which still use the archaic “application desktop” system (all the document windows are children of a “main” window) – and therefore are hideously multi-monitor unfriendly.
Have you tried running Civ IV in windowed mode, but enlarged until it takes up the entire screen? I get similar kinds of problems with some of the way-to-graphics-intensive online games that I’ve played. They just don’t share the video card well when in full screen mode.