title: Multiple monitors
author: Raybot

<strong>INTRODUCTION:</strong><br>
Windows 98SE, ME, 2k, XP (and presumably above) have the ability to utilize 
more than 1 display adapter (video card or inbuilt video chip) and, in some 
cases, more than 1 monitor on 1 display adapter (often called a dualhead 
display adapter), at any one time. This means that with appropriate 
hardware, you can your desktop spread over 2 or more monitors. This is 
particularly useful for CAD-style applications such as QuArK as you can 
have your main display filled with the drawing area whilst you can push 
toolbars, texture windows, guide images, compile messages, chat windows, 
tutorial documents, other graphics programs and the like on your secondary 
monitors. Note that having multiple monitors will increase the strain on 
your computer so you should have a reasonably fast computer to begin with 
(you probably shouldn't try doing this on anything slower than 300MHz if 
you're running things that are straining the CPU already for instance). 
Also note that not all programs like running on secondary monitors. 
Anything that docks (such as ICQ) may refuse to move into the secondary 
monitors and many overlay-based programs such as TV tuner programs may 
behave unusually or run with very high CPU usage on secondary monitors. And 
of course, anything that uses the video card's special ability such as 3D 
acceleration, inbuilt TV capture overlay or 3DVR will only work on the 
display adapter that has that capability.


<strong>LAPTOPS (98SE/ME/2k/XP):</strong></br>
If your computer is a laptop, it must have a video chip that is itself 
capable of running 2 monitors (a chip with dualhead capabilities). Examples 
include the Trident Cyberblade, ATI Rage Mobility M1 (P series only for 
Win98SE/ME) and the nVidia GeForce2Go and GeForce 4 440Go/420Go. In the 
case of a laptop, one screen will be the internal flat panel display and 
one screen will be a monitor plugged into the video out port. You can tell 
if your laptop supports multimonitor setups by right clicking on the 
desktop, selecting properties then clicking the settings tab. If you get 2 
screens (1 will be grayed out) then your video chip supports multimonitors. 
If this is not the case, try it with the newest drivers you can find, 
either from the maker of the laptop or from the maker of the video chip 
that the laptop uses. Note that for some reason, this multi monitor ability 
is rarely advertised in the laptop manual or promotional material. If your 
laptop's inbuilt display adapter doesn't support multiple monitors or you 
want to run 3 screens and you have a PCI docking station, you can often 
still run multiple monitors by using a PCI video card in the docking 
station, in similar way to a desktop as outlined below. Examples of laptops 
where this has been reported to work include the Dell Latitude series with 
PCI docking stations.


<strong>DESKTOPS:</strong><br>
If your computer is a standard desktop, you can put in additional PCI video 
cards and attach additional monitors to them (note that not all PCI video 
cards support multiple monitors and a lot of the ones that do have problems 
with Windows 2000/XP - see below). In fact, you can get dual head PCI video 
cards such as some with the GeForce2MX chipset and some earlier Matrox 
video cards. Note that the drivers that ship with Windows will almost never 
work in multimonitor setups, you'll need to download new drivers from the 
maker (which can get tricky if the maker no longer exists, in which case 
try places like www.driverguide.com which carry archives). Also note that 
these discussions apply for dualhead cards where you wish to run 3 or more 
monitors (ie. you'll need another card anyway). If you have a dualhead card 
and only want to run 2 monitors, follow the instructions that came with the 
card ;-)


DESKTOPS - WINDOWS 98SE/ME:
Under Windows 98 and ME, the display adapter that will drive your primary 
display (the one that 3D games will drop into for instance) is the display 
adapter that your BIOS screen boots on. You can select this normally in the 
PnP section of your BIOS (yes its a weird place to put it but that's where 
its put usually). Look for an option that you can toggle from PCI to AGP. 
In most cases, you will want to leave this as AGP. When you get into 
Windows, simply install the drivers for your other cards as you would 
normally, reboot and the next time you go into Windows you should see in 
the settings tab of the display properties aplet one or more grayed out 
screens which you can enable using the 'extend desktop' check box. Once 
enabled, you can drag the screens around in the aplet to match your 
physical configuration.


DESKTOPS - WINDOWS 2K/XP:
Under Windows 2000 (and presumably XP), you can switch your primary display 
adapter on the fly so you don't need to boot off the display adapter that 
you wish to run your 3D games and single monitor applications on. However, 
there is a different problem, being that there are very few older PCI video 
cards that Windows 2000 and XP can initialize after bootup (Microsoft's 
knowledge base unhelpfully states that the video card needs to have a 
'disable VGA' switch and you need to turn this off - I've only seen 1 video 
card with this, a Matrox MGA-2064W, and it only works with this switch 
ON!). As a result, generally you will need to set a PCI video card to boot 
in the BIOS then get Windows 2000 to initialize your AGP video card once 
the desktop appears.

If you want a 3rd monitor or if you must boot off your AGP card (for 
instance your BIOS doesn't allow you to change it, as is common on 
motherboards with onboard display adapters), you will need to find a video 
card that supports Windows 2000 dual monitors. Examples include Matrox 
video cards and newer nVidia-based video cards. Once you've found a 
combination of video cards that works, you can install them then use the 
'extend desktop' check box in the settings tab of the display properties 
aplet to enable them. Again, once enabled you can drag the screens around 
in the aplet to match your physical configuration. Also note that there is 
a 'primary monitor' check box which you use to select which monitor will 
show single-monitor mode programs such as 3D games.


For more information on other issues, as well as listings of combinations 
of video cards that users have had success with, see 
<a href=http://www.realtimesoft.com/multimon>www.realtimesoft.com/multimon</a> .
