A couple of days ago, I decided to try something that I've never tried before. I'm the guy that people call to fix their computers. I don't have a business, or any set rates. I let them give whatever they want. Some don't pay anything. Occasionally I've been given their old computers as payment.
Unfortunately, to date, these computers have been old and/or damaged, but that's OK, still good for parts. Anyway one guy gave me a monitor as well.
It crossed my mind one day to try and hook up this monitor to my current computer. My problem is that I already have a monitor hooked up but its possible to hook up two monitors that act like one big monitor.
Why? There are any number of reasons give to have a Dual Monitor setup. Mine? To watch movies. A short while ago I traded monitors with my Sister. Its a larger one than I had with a flatter screen. She has two young boys and the monitor they had, is very dark in the daytime.
They wanted a plainer one, and wanted me to trade with them. I live in a basement apartment, its a lot darker here on a daily basis so Its no problem with me.
The only problem now is that its is still hard to watch movies. Even with the monitor turned up to its brightest settings, movies looked very dark. I went online to try and find a solution but found nothing except some very technical stuff, a bit out of my range.
Then of course, as already mentioned, I received another monitor. I didn't want to switch, because its a smaller screen and not so flat. That's when I considered trying to set up a Dual Monitor.
But first I had to find out how. So I decided to check with the greatest resource bank ever, the internet.
www.microsoft.com/athome/moredone/twomonitors.mspx
lifehacker.com/software/dual-monitor/how-to-set-up-dual-monitors-218991.php
www.cyberinkdesign.com/dual_monitors.htm
Apparently you either need a video card with the dual plugins, which I don't have or you can just put a second video card into your computer.
I had no choice but to go with the second video card option. My main video card is a ATI Technologies, Inc. 3D RAGE PRO AGP 2X. It's a AGP card and there is only room for one inside your computer. The second card in this case could only be a PCI based card. Just happen to have one. A Matrox Graphics Millennium PCI.
I have an older computer system, a Compaq deskpro - P2-400, the 3D RAGE PRO only has 8MB of Video RAM, the Matrox only has two.
So I put the PCI card into my computer and restarted my system. My computer started booting up but there was nothing coming on my monitor. Then I realized that my computer was treating the PCI card has my main one.
I should have printed up the instructions first. But then I remembered reading about having to change a BIOS setting to set my AGP as the default. ON my older system I wasn't even sure if this setting was going to be there.
So I restarted my computer, and on my system, I have to hit F10 to access my BIOS. Then there was a menu across the top with familiar options, like, File, Storage, security, Power, and Advanced.
Some BIOS setups will give you access to your mouse. This one doesn't. So I used the arrow keys on the keyboard and went to the Advanced menu, then PCI VGA Configuration. Then a box opened up listing both cards:
Matrox VGA Controller - Primary VGA device
ATI VGA controller - Non-boot device
I had to switch them around, again using the arrow keys and choosing each one, then the left and right arrow keys to change the options and finally pressing F10 to accept the changes
So now it read:
Matrox VGA Controller - Non-boot device
ATI VGA controller - Primary VGA device
Finally, I had to move back to the File menu and move down to the Save Changes and Exit option. Hitting enter and then when this message popped up:
Are you sure you want to save changes and exit?
I had to press F10 again to accept. This caused the computer to automatically to reboot.
It seemed to start up Ok this time. Like I said before, it's my first time for doing anything like this so I wasn't sure what to expect. When the computer started up, on my second computer there was nothing but a blank screen. No toolbars or anything.
So I right clicked on my desktop to check the settings.
Clicking on
properties, and then clicking on the Settings tab and sure enough there was a dual video setup instead of the previous one, I was on the right track anyway.
Its recommended that you set each monitor at the same resolution and colour depth, So I click on the display line to change monitors and set both to 800x600 and Colour quality: Medium(16bit)
I then clicked on the Identify, and a big white number 1 appeared on my first monitor and the number 2 on the second. I could also drag windows from my main monitor over to the other...COOOOLLLL. It worked but unfortunately, movies dragged over would not play. Me thinks it has something to do with the lack of power in the second video card, (2MB) remember.
Right now I'm considering this experiment a success. I'll work out these little issue later as I get use to the setup. Until next time.
FYI
This is what my video card setup looked Before:
This is what my video card setup looked After:
