Adding a second (or third monitor) to your windows machine the ghetto method.
Hey there cheapskate… I haven’t said that in a while.
Well if you find yourself here you are either an avid AtA reader or you are looking for a cheap dual monitor solution. Sure you could go buy a shinny purty new video card with multiple outputs and do this the easy way but, we are here to give you an alternative. If you are like us you live amongst a computer graveyard or a pile of technology…
Whatever you call your crap aka where the old computer go to die, find yourself a video card and a crt monitor.
I grabbed a old PCI graphics card from a 6 year old non-branded machine. This is as generic as they come. I currently have a ati graphics card in my machine but I leave that alone and add the second card. I connected a 19″ crt beast to it and booted back up into Windows XP.
The second monitor went green but no image was displayed on the screen. This is a great start.
I then went into the display properties by right clicking on my desktop and choosing Properties. You will see this screen:
Click the settings button and then click the picture of the monitor. Now select extend my desktop on to this screen.
Hit apply and now anything you drag to the right border of your screen will move on over to the other display! Now I can keep my mail queue, inbox, analytics or pretty much anything open FULL SCREEN and still have enough real estate to work. Once you get this going you will never want to go back – so be forewarned you might wind up dropping a pretty penny for some bezel-less monitors and that fancy graphics card after all.
Seeming this graphic card I used is ancient I can only get 1024×768 on the secondary monitor – not a deal breaker but I will be on the lookout for some more junk a better graphic card
September 17, 2008 - 12:17 pm
Dual screen rules ! I’m working on a Optiplex GX280 Dell systemp with two 19″ flatscreen…and now, i can’t live without !
Do you know if Ubuntu support dual screen display ?
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September 18, 2008 - 12:56 am
Great idea, I might give this a go at the weekend. I’m sure I have a graphics card laying around somewhere, its just whether I have a spare monitor.
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September 18, 2008 - 11:35 am
My work setup is 4 19″ monitors. I love it. Some people call it excessive, I call it fun.
It took some wrangling to get 4 working together but it was worth it. My boss is jealous and keeps hinting that he wants me to set him up with 4 monitors because my 4 is better than his 3.
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NinjaAdmin Reply:
September 18th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Share the tricks of the trade Admiralapathy1
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Admiralapathy Reply:
September 19th, 2008 at 5:21 am
I have 4-19″ LCD monitors each with one analog and one digital input. Two different brand video cards. One card is a Diamond S9250 business level card that is marketed to people that want multiple monitors but aren’t running high resolution graphics. The other card is a RADEON X800GT.
Out of the Diamond card I am running one digital and one analog output both at 1280 x 1024. Out of the Radeon I am running one digital output that splits into two DVIs that I then convert one over to analog both of which are also running 1280×1024.
Getting to this setup was a lot of trial and error and a few headaches. I followed all of teh steps that are posted in the article as well.
I also use Ultramon and had to use some of the settings in there to help me out. I wish I took notes on what exactly I did because it is going to be a pain to repeat the process if I ever have to.
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November 3, 2009 - 6:24 pm
I run dual screens, with two 1440×900 monitors. Once you have two, you’re never going back. I think the next milestone is to buy another two identical ones and having them suspended above my current two.
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