Two monitors on one PC - how and why

Why?
The main reasons more desktop space for not a lot of money. It really depends on what crud you have lying around to play with... Having had quite a lot of PC hardware donated to me via my work and friends and family, I have a few spare monitors lying round. I was using my 17" Dell flat screen CRT and for a while have really wanted to get a 19" or 21" monitor to help with graphics and web work. I came across a Dell 15" screen, with the sony Trinitron tube which i really like, and the idea fore running twin displays seemed a good one.

Recently, I got a Dell Dimension PIII 600, for £35 and it came with a Dell p790 monitor - the exact match for my current screen. So I now have a matched pair of 17" CRT screens both at 1280x1024 or 2560x1024 overall. Needless to say this gives me huge desktop area to play with, and looks better with the symetry. I also got my setup working in Gentoo and X.org, and will be posting some info on that shortly.

• I run my 17"s in 1280*1024 @85Hz. This gives me more desktop area than a 1600*1200 display.
• Many applications allow menu bars to be moved into their own separate windows, so i can have just an image open on my main screen and all the Paint shop pro or photoshop toolbar's on the other screen. Dreamweaver and Homesite allow mw to edit HTML in the same way.
• I can leave an application open in each window, allowing me to run and use 2 things at once. Useful when you want to use material off the web and write a word doc using it and so on.
• It just looks quite cool to have 2 monitors on my desk.

How?
Really quite easy if you have the right tools. You will need 2 monitors, and either a graphics card which will drive 2 monitors or 2 graphics cards. Most recent graphics cards have 3 ports on the back, a VGA output, a TV output and a DVI output for TFT screens. If you have a TFT and a CRT to use, just plug them in and go. Otherwise buy an adaptor cable to turn a DVI into the normal VGA cable and thats all thats needed.

If, like me you do not have a dual head graphics card, a second graphics card will be needed. This means finding a PCI graphics card which has the capability to drive the resolution that you want to use on tyour second monitor. I found a PCI 3dfx Voodoo 3 2000 card which will do just fine. Any 4mb PCI card should do and are going to be really cheap second hand, unless you want to use a 17" or above monitor at high res where you will need a slightly better card. Just remember to check the specs on the card (max res and refresh rate) against the mode you wish to use on your monitor.

Before fitting your second graphics card, go into the BIOS and make sure that the machine is set to boot from your AGP card so windows will come up on your original monitor. Note that many mother boards with built in card tend to want to boot up and use any add in card as the primary adaptor. This can be rectified in win XP anyway.

Windows XP is quite easy to use dual monitors with. Simply select the second monitor and setup as you would normally. Then tick the "extend my desktop onto this monitor" option. Check the box for whichever monitor you want to be primary and thats it. Be aware that the primary monitor / card will be the one that is used for games and full screen video - so make sure your main screen is on your gaming card if needed.

If you have a Nvidia graphics card, the drivers installed should have added some useful dual screen features. Under the advanced options button on the above screenshot, you should have a nvidia button (1). Click on this, desktop utilites (2), desktop manager configuration (3) and then hot keys (4). You can now set hot keys to move windows between screens and other cool tricks. All the above steps are in this screenshot to illustrate it a bit better. I fyou don't have these options, you can download the latest drivers for the Nvidia website. Also make sure you enable Nview if prompted.

Hopefully this will have helped you a little and given you a good idea of how to do this. The aim with some more money is to have 3 * 17" TFT panels in a wrap round configuration, which would be sweet, but cost a little too much :-).