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You are here: Home / Science & Technology / Monitor Issues

Monitor Issues

by John Cole|  October 5, 20081:10 pm| 54 Comments

This post is in: Science & Technology

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Help.

I have a 24″ monitor hooked up to my computer as my main monitor, and off to the left is a 19″ monitor which is also hooked up. Both are using DVI cords.

As it is, I can get my desktop background on the second monitor, but nothing else. How do I set it up so that I can swing documents over to the little monitor while still using the main monitor?

Windows Vista, btw.

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54Comments

  1. 1.

    Ed Marshall

    October 5, 2008 at 1:15 pm

    I used ultramon on my video editing setup, but I think it needs compliant monitors. I’m not positive on that though.

  2. 2.

    Octavian

    October 5, 2008 at 1:16 pm

    Fuse the two monitors together with a soldering iron.

  3. 3.

    Ed Marshall

    October 5, 2008 at 1:18 pm

    Nah, it should work for you, you can get it here

  4. 4.

    fragmagnet

    October 5, 2008 at 1:21 pm

    Might be working already, but Vista is confused about left & right arrangement. Have you tried dragging a window off in all directions to see where Vista thinks the 19" is sitting? When you look at Display Settings you can change the orientation of the monitors by moving the little monitors labeled "1" & "2". I have Vista on 2 20" DVI monitors, works just as expected.

  5. 5.

    dmsilev

    October 5, 2008 at 1:21 pm

    I had a colleague who spent many hours trying to convince Vista to do that. After all of the experiments and tweakings failed to produce any useful results, the two suggestions were (a) sacrifice a chicken to the computer gods or (b) go over to the dark side and get a Mac.

    He chose ( c), give up on two monitors running at once.

    My recollection under XP was that the Desktop Settings dialog box had an option for "extend desktop onto second monitor" or something along those lines; I’d suggest looking for an option with similar wording in Vista. Beyond that, check that the drivers for your display card are up to date.

    -dms

  6. 6.

    JSmith

    October 5, 2008 at 1:22 pm

    Try…

    Start button…, control panel…, Appearance and Personalization…, Personalization…Adjust screen resolution. Click on the box with the number two in it. Click the check box Extend the desktop onto this monitor.

    After doing all of that, send an angry email to Bill Gates and Steve Balmer.

  7. 7.

    harshcore

    October 5, 2008 at 1:23 pm

    If you’re using Windows, right-click on the desktop and select properties. Under the settings tab there are the options you want including checboxes for making one monitor your primary and allowing you to drag across monitors.

  8. 8.

    bago

    October 5, 2008 at 1:27 pm

    Extend desktop or go into presentation mode. I have a 17" laptop with blu-ray and my 53" hdtv is my second monitor.

    Very nice.

    You just need to set you main monitor in display settings and ensure extend my desktop is checked. Also, get Ultramon, as it will make sure the window groupings make sense in your taskbar.

  9. 9.

    John Cole

    October 5, 2008 at 1:35 pm

    None of this is working. No matter what I do, all I see on the little monitor is the background. I can not drag documents on to it.

  10. 10.

    TheFountainHead

    October 5, 2008 at 1:39 pm

    I do this with my laptop every day. But I have a Mac.

  11. 11.

    Martin

    October 5, 2008 at 1:40 pm

    Mac OS X, ftw.

  12. 12.

    MarkusB

    October 5, 2008 at 1:42 pm

    I wish I could help you, but after trying to help a couple of other people with their Vista systems, I shrugged my shoulders and basically gave up the whole "computer friend" (i.e. unpaid consultant) role. I mean, I’ll still help when I can with anything I know about, but to the extent it’s a Vista world I’m now in the old-fart "get off my lawn" know-nothing contingent.

    Also, I don’t have two monitors, a cool blog, or the respect of moonbats everywhere, so I’m all jealous and stuff.

  13. 13.

    Polish the Guillotines

    October 5, 2008 at 1:42 pm

    None of this is working. No matter what I do, all I see on the little monitor is the background. I can not drag documents on to it.

    Have you tried dragging the documents off to the right side?

    Also, what’s your graphics card and is there a control panel for it?

  14. 14.

    John Cole

    October 5, 2008 at 1:45 pm

    Have you tried dragging the documents off to the right side?

    Ok. I feel like a moron. That worked.

    Since my little monitor is to the left, how do I get it so that I can drag it to the left and it goes to the little monitor?

  15. 15.

    bago

    October 5, 2008 at 1:45 pm

    put in a screenshot of what happens when you right click your desktop and go to display settings. hit printscreen to copy a screenshot to your clipboard and then open pbrush or photoship and paste it to get it out and save it.

  16. 16.

    Malron

    October 5, 2008 at 1:47 pm

    John, I have used the same setup in XP (current) and previously in Vista. I have a 37" LCD TV as my main monitor with a 21" Wacom Cintiq tablet monitor as my backup. It worked on both operating systems.

    Have you tried updating your video drivers? It might be a simple incompatibility problem between your video drivers and Vista. I assume that you’re using a video card and not motherboard video?

  17. 17.

    MarkusB

    October 5, 2008 at 1:47 pm

    Blockquotes kill formatting?

    Do they just blow it away with their unremitting boldness?

  18. 18.

    John Cole

    October 5, 2008 at 1:48 pm

    Never mind, got it.

    Thanks

  19. 19.

    Leszek Pawlowicz

    October 5, 2008 at 1:50 pm

    In the Personalization page, click on Display Settings. Then click and hold on the Monitor 2 item, and drag it over to the left of Monitor 1. Click OK, and you’re good to go.

  20. 20.

    Polish the Guillotines

    October 5, 2008 at 1:51 pm

    Ok. I feel like a moron. That worked.

    Well, it’s not like that’s the intuitive thing to do. Leszek’s got you covered on the layout.

  21. 21.

    Martin

    October 5, 2008 at 1:53 pm

    Ok. I feel like a moron. That worked.
    Since my little monitor is to the left, how do I get it so that I can drag it to the left and it goes to the little monitor?

    If your computer is too fucking stupid to recognize where it is in relation to other physical objects in your den, I’d just give in and move the monitor to the right side.

  22. 22.

    Michael D.

    October 5, 2008 at 2:08 pm

    If you hit the top of your monitor with your hand a few times, it will work. Just whack it with your hand.

  23. 23.

    gbear

    October 5, 2008 at 2:16 pm

    Just whack it with your hand.

    Actually that could cause an injury. OSHA recommends that you whack your monitor with your keyboard. Don’t endanger those hands!

  24. 24.

    Ella in NM

    October 5, 2008 at 2:17 pm

    Someone remind me why people seem to like rigging this multi-screen system up lately? Not enough frustration with your existing computers?

  25. 25.

    gbear

    October 5, 2008 at 2:28 pm

    Someone remind me why people seem to like rigging this multi-screen system up lately?

    Three reasons that I like having two screens at work.

    1. I can work full-screen on an autocad drawing on one screen while having room on the other to keep Outlook open for incoming mail and also have room to keep some of autocad’s menu boxes off the main screen.

    2. Makes it easy to copy/drag information from document to document. You can keep both documents right in front of you until you get it the way you want it.

    3. You can have a full screen of autocad up while still sneaking a smaller window of Balloon Juice onto the other screen (usually trying to make it look like an email), occasionally panning the autocad drawing so that it looks like you’re doing something.

  26. 26.

    bago

    October 5, 2008 at 2:34 pm

    Api reference on screen, code in the other.

  27. 27.

    Catsy

    October 5, 2008 at 2:35 pm

    For a variety of reasons, Ella. Gamers do it so that they can surf the web, read strategy guides or forums, or other things while they’re gaming, for example.

    At work I have three 19" monitors set up in a very slight curve. The center one is rotated into portrait mode; that’s my main monitor. The left one is my laptop dock, and the right one is the second monitor for my desktop. I have Synergy set up so that my docked laptop can share my mouse, keyboard, and clipboard. The left and right monitors are both in normal (landscape) orientation. I /have/ to have at least two monitors at work in order to do my job efficiently, and I work better with three.

    My main home desktop is primarily a gaming machine, so it’s hooked up to a 25" widescreen monitor in landscape, with the laptop dock to the left and connected to a 19" monitor in portrait.

    John, I highly recommend rotating your smaller, secondary monitor into portrait mode. It’s awesome for reading/writing email or documents, or for blogs or other long web pages, though obviously you want one monitor in landscape for working in remote desktop, playing games, or reading web pages that don’t look right in portrait. Once you get used to it, you won’t want to go back.

    (Afterthought: wow, this new comment editing software is complete epic fail. Total piece of shit. Can we have an option for "I know what the fuck I’m doing" mode, where it doesn’t try to second-guess the formatting I use?)

  28. 28.

    phd-must be elitist

    October 5, 2008 at 2:35 pm

    right click on desktop

    select "properties"

    Go to Setting tab.

    Click advanced.

    After that, vista should be different than XP. But hopefully that will get you in the area

  29. 29.

    John Cole

    October 5, 2008 at 2:49 pm

    Someone remind me why people seem to like rigging this multi-screen system up lately? Not enough frustration with your existing computers?

    So I can have multiple papers up at once when I grade, and also so I can have AIM and other software that irritates me when it flashes from an incoming message off the main screen. Also, sometimes I like to throw in a dvd and watch it while grading.

    Additionally, when writing, it helps to have the source material off to the left so you can easily cut and paste, etc. Also, I usually have a number of productivity applications running at once, so it is easier than having to alt tab through a number of things. There are just a lot of reasons.

  30. 30.

    Товарищ НеинтереснаяСобака

    October 5, 2008 at 3:03 pm

    @phd-must be elitist:

    Nope, completely backwards. Right click on desktop, select "personalize," click on "display settings," and from there it’s exactly the same as XP.

    I don’t know why they reorganized so many things that didn’t need reorganizing, but it is a little bit more logical now.

  31. 31.

    gbear

    October 5, 2008 at 3:07 pm

    John, someone is having worse monitor issues than you.

  32. 32.

    Dennis - SGMM

    October 5, 2008 at 3:18 pm

    This is one of the many reasons that John McCain doesn’t use a computer therefore, John’s post is Good News for McCain.

  33. 33.

    Polish the Guillotines

    October 5, 2008 at 3:22 pm

    I don’t know why they reorganized so many things that didn’t need reorganizing, but it is a little bit more logical now.

    Blame Vista User Account Control. M’soft tried to segregate out stuff that non-admin users should be able to do without needing admin privileges. All the stuff that non-admin accounts in XP were barred from touching. Stupid stuff like changing desktop backgrounds and screen savers.

    It’s logical in that sense, but still amounts to playing a lot of "Where in the World Is That Fucking Setting."

  34. 34.

    ArtV

    October 5, 2008 at 3:27 pm

    It’s also great for playing WAR on one monitor and reading your blog on the other.

  35. 35.

    Erieg

    October 5, 2008 at 3:33 pm

    Right mouse click the desktop, choose properties. Once the window pops up choose settings. It should show both monitors and what position they are in. You should be able to left mouse click the monitor you want to be on the right or left and drag it into position. Once you have the monitors in the position you want click on whichever one you want to be the primary monitor and check the "use this device as the primary monitor" box.

    The one thing that could throw this off is if your video driver also has control of dual monitor setup. You can look under control panel and see if there is an icon for the display driver and check to see if there is dual monitor setup under that. If so you will have to make all changes there.

    As far as using multiple desktops I suggest using "multimon" it is a free program that you can download. It will give you a taskbar on the secondary monitor and also place an arrow in the individual program windows that allows you to quickly move the program from one monitor to the other.

    If i had to guess though, I would say that you are running into the conflict between the display drivers and the OS controls.

  36. 36.

    TheFountainHead

    October 5, 2008 at 3:34 pm

    It’s also great for playing WAR on one monitor and reading your blog on the other.

    How is WAR??

  37. 37.

    Polish the Guillotines

    October 5, 2008 at 3:37 pm

    How is WAR??

    It can’t possibly be as good as this.

  38. 38.

    TheFountainHead

    October 5, 2008 at 3:48 pm

    It can’t possibly be as good as this.

    Heh. Sometimes I’m glad I’ve moved on from that game.

  39. 39.

    Sean

    October 5, 2008 at 4:08 pm

    Everyone get that? Vista wasn’t the problem :)

  40. 40.

    John Cole

    October 5, 2008 at 4:14 pm

    As someone who has an Apple at work, a windows Vista machine for home, and XP on an old laptop, I have to say that I like Vista and the Apple OS equally. They are both very nice.

    People trashing Vista must have old machines that could not support it, because with enough hardware resources, it just hums along nicely for me. I like it a lot.

  41. 41.

    TheFountainHead

    October 5, 2008 at 4:25 pm

    People trashing Vista must have old machines that could not support it, because with enough hardware resources, it just hums along nicely for me. I like it a lot.

    My issues with Vista have much to do with the unevenly applied UI choices and, as you mentioned, how incredibly inefficient it is with system resources. There’s also the issue of all the AWFUL software it gets packaged with that you need to be a surgeon to remove.

  42. 42.

    AkaDad

    October 5, 2008 at 4:33 pm

    Everyone get that? Vista wasn’t the problem :)

    I see what you did there.

  43. 43.

    Brachiator

    October 5, 2008 at 4:34 pm

    Slightly OT (but this is a techy thread).

    OK, how do you do this (@phd-must be elitist) cross-reference thingy?

  44. 44.

    gbear

    October 5, 2008 at 5:07 pm

    @Brachiator:

    See that little left turn arrow next to the time in each person’s comment? Click on that to respond to someone.

  45. 45.

    Maxwel

    October 5, 2008 at 5:34 pm

    If you have an Nvidia GPU, the Nvidia Control Panel has a section for multiple displays. In Xp you get to it by right clicking the Desktop.

  46. 46.

    Brachiator

    October 5, 2008 at 5:35 pm

    @gbear:

    Sweet! Thanks. It would be good to have a summary of features again after all shakedowns have been completed.

    Also, it’s odd that the preview does not fully show the cross-reference. My fingers are crossed that it shows up OK in the final message.

  47. 47.

    MarkusB

    October 5, 2008 at 6:32 pm

    I don’t even know enough about Vista to dump on it. I just know what I went through a couple of times when it was first rolling out, and to be fair, at least one of those incidents was not entirely Vista’s fault.

    I’ve decided *nix is more fun anyway. That’s probably the truthier reason I don’t know beans about them newfangled winders.

  48. 48.

    Polish the Guillotines

    October 5, 2008 at 6:57 pm

    My issues with Vista have much to do with the unevenly applied UI choices and, as you mentioned, how incredibly inefficient it is with system resources.

    I do a lot of testing with different PC hardware with XP and Vista. XP is a rock. A fast-moving rock. You can pry it from my cold, dead hands.

    Vista really requires massive firepower to reach the snappiness of XP. Forget trying to run it on anything less than a Core2 proc with a dedicated GPU (nVidia or ATI) and 2GB of RAM.

    The Aero graphics stuff is pretty but costly, and the Sidebar is the same way. Although, Sidebar can get pretty cool with some of the gadgets out there.

    If you’ve got an older machine or a bottom-rung laptop, running Vista in Classic mode without the Sidebar will really speed up the feel — at the expense of appearances. Still it’s pretty clean looking in Classic.

    There’s also the issue of all the AWFUL software it gets packaged with that you need to be a surgeon to remove.

    That’s really not M’soft’s fault. The major computer companies lard up their installs with tons of "value added" software. Some is worthwhile, but a lot of it is trash. Knowing what to get rid of is a black art indeed. It’s also a drag that in most cases, you only get a factory re-image/restore, not a clean OS installer.

  49. 49.

    srv

    October 5, 2008 at 7:45 pm

    If you can’t figure it out, you do not deserve to have such monitor pr0n.

  50. 50.

    greylocks

    October 6, 2008 at 12:56 am

    John, depending on your video card and monitor, you may have some other handy options also, such as 90-degree rotation, or the ability to force all programs to open in a window (this mainly applies to game programs that try to grab the whole screen).

    With NVIDIA-based graphics cards, these options can usually be accessed by right-clicking anywhere on the desktop and selecting NVIDIA Display from the pop-up menu, then chosing the monitor from the submenu.

  51. 51.

    Mike D.

    October 6, 2008 at 1:25 am

    @Ella in NM:

    Frankly, if you don’t have a big monitor dead ahead and a slightly smaller monitor off to one side, you’re not working hard enough. I have a seven-button mouse, a 120-key keyboard, a programmable palm-rest game minikeyboard, voice recognition and a fruity, cheery West Midlands speech synthesizer offering opinions on everything that happens, plus a quiet and efficient German robo-lady who cuts through the chatter with matter-of-fact updates of great importance, and I still don’t quite feel organized enough to construct a Great Pyramid.

    This new joint, though, the Black Headband of Doom with the EEG receptors (sorry, no link; it’s ritually unclean), that’s where I draw the line. That and shining laser beams into my eye for any reason. Bugger off with that crap.

  52. 52.

    Mike D.

    October 6, 2008 at 1:37 am

    @Polish the Guillotines: TESTIFY! After three years on one XP installation, I just about have everything doing what it’s supposed to be doing, stripped for speed like a Hell’s Angel’s Harley. The punchline is that my old machine exceeds Vista’s requirements (as distinct from "this peripheral/software/installer dies in flames under Vista — plz hlp kthxbi") going away. What exactly is the killer app on Vista? Halo 4? A GPU that cruises at 75C, a.k.a. DX10a? Being able to run all your old wares on your old box without systematically disabling all that idealistic but constipating built-in security? Oh please.

  53. 53.

    will

    October 6, 2008 at 1:46 am

    The connection is probably dirty. I recommend you dunk both monitors in water and give ’em a good scrubbing.

  54. 54.

    Pat

    October 6, 2008 at 7:17 am

    I have a dual-monitor setup and use a spare laptop which I occasionally use as a third monitor.

    – Ultramon as recommended makes moving windows easier. It adds two buttons to the top right of the window (by the minimize / maximize area) so you just click a button and it moves between windows, no need to drag.

    – Sometimes (always?) you can’t drag a maximized window onto another screen. It needs to be resizable.

    – Multi-monitor works best when the monitors are the same size and display resolution (I know this because my setup isn’t).

    – If you have a spare laptop and want to use it as a third monitor, look google Maxivista.

    – When you’re in the display – properties and looking at multiple windows, the "identify" button will tell you which monitor is which number.

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