What do I need to have for a 2 screen setup??

londonman81

I've been lucky enough to be allowed to take home my old 15inch flat screen monitor from work as we are getting new 19 inch screens soon.

At home I am currently on a single 17inch flast screen setup.

I would like to be able to use the smaller one from work along side my current screen.

What hardware/software do I need to have in order to be able to do this?? I assume I would need a dual card? And what happens to my current single scrren card?

Please bear in mind that I don't want to spend a fortune on getting this set up - if a cheap dual card will do then thats fine by me.


Thanks!

L

londonman81

Ooops I thought I was posting on the Techie Forum - apologies!

JPS

Hi,

I currently have dual screens and it rocks - it's amazing how much more you can do. I have a 17" TFT as my main screen and a smaller 15" widescreen as my secondary screen. It's so simple to set it up. All you need is a dual output video card (I have the Radeon 9800 pro).

If both your monitors have VGA leads then you will need an adapter on one of them to make it DVI (which should come with any dual output graphics card). Then you plug them in and it should auto setup. If not you can mess around with the settings and set them up how you like. I use mine as an extended desktop (so it is one big screen). I have Windows Media, MSN and poker etc on the smaller screen and then IE and the things I am working on on the main screen.

As far as I am aware you will have to scrap the single screen card and buy a cheap dual.

HTH

Josh

beara

You don't need to scrap the single output video card, you just need to add another single output video card. Windows versions from 2000 pro onwards can cope with this by themselves. You can run as many monitors as you can fit video cards into the machine, up to a maximum of 9. I run two twin screen systems on XP pro with dualhead matrox cards, but I started back in 2000 with W2K and two cards (one AGP slot and one PCI slot) and windows automatically configures it.

Happychappy

Hi I use a 19" tft and a 21" crt or normal computer monitor for web design. I have a dual head graphics card which you simply plug both monitors into at the back of your pc. With XP home it really is very simple and both monitors can either act independently in so far as you can have oulook express on one and a web site on the other or two web sites. The Matrox 400/450 dual head card is pretty old stuff but still works fine and you can get one on Ebay for around £5 or so. Hope it works out, but it really is very easy and not rocket science

londonman81

Great news - just remembered that I installed a DVI output graphics card last year to take advantage of that feature on my main monitor (17inch DVI).

On that graphics card is a second output for analogue - and I forgto about this totally, along with the fact that I had a dual card already!

I've just installed the second monitor and it is working - but the only problem I'm having now is getting the desktop to stretch across both screens like it does at work.

At the moment I get the same image on the second screen as I do on the main screen - not much use.

How do I get the two screens to work as one - if you know what I mean.

I would like to be able to drag an Excel window over to the other monitor and then open up somethign new on the main one.

I've read various websites which mention something about going to Diplay>Properties>Settings and checking for something there. But I cant find the options mentioned.

Any help would be much appreciated and thanks for all repsonses so far!

JPS

Depends if your GPU is ATI, Nvidea or another make. You need to download the latest drivers and display software for your graphics card. This will allow you to choose how you want your 2 monitors to act. What is the make and model of your graphics card?

londonman81

JPS - the make and model of my dual graphics card is a Radeon 9250 PCI card. Installed it last year.

The second monitor I have is an NEC MultiSync LCD1500M. It is quite an old monitor. The first place I tried to download the driver from was NEC's own website but it opened some WinZip self extract in German! And it didnt seem to do anything.

Then i downloaded some other general NEC monitor downloads file but it didn't seem to have my monitor.

Then I just restarted the machine it started displayingi the same image in the second monitor as the main one....I thought it was working and would just be a matter of adjusting settings.


I do not get the '1' and '2' monitor icons as stated on many websites such as this one:

http://freepctech.com/pc/001/guide_dual_monitors.shtml


Any help much appreciated...i thought i was there...