PCA Forums

How to set up 2 monitors to have 2 seperate desktops? Using nView (with the desktop management thing) how do I use it to set up 1 desktop to use 1 monitor and the other desktop to output to another monitor or tv?

I dont want to just extend onto the tv.

Assuming your card is a dual head, when you go into Display Properties->Settings there should be two displays visible but one grayed out. Click on the grayed out display and then check the box labeled "Extend my Windows desktop onto this monitor".

Then size and position the display as you like.

how would you do with with two cards? I have a Geforce 3 Ti500 and some old PCI crap card, a nice 19" sony monitor and a crap 17" dell... Could i get that working? As of christmas day i'll have two sets of nice mice and keyboards (getting wireless logitech mouse + KB)... but how would that work?

You can make it work with any crap PCI card as your 2nd card BUT your desktop performance will be limited to the capabilities of the slowest card, so you want something better than some old Triden POS.

You can experiment with it and if you like it then get a better card later. The 2nd card doesn't need any decent 3D since it's only for 2D.

I was using a Savage 4 along with my GF3 Ti200 but it relaly lagged the desktop (decent enough card by itself, but I suspect the drivers poorly supported muliple monitors).

I'm using a GF2 MX200 now along with the GF3 Ti200. Works great.

Just install the 2nd card. MAKE SURE that in BIOS if you have a setting for primary video card set it for AGP (most motherboards default to making the PCI card the primary).

Boot into windows, install the driver for the 2nd card and then follow the same instructions as I posted above.

NView is a built in utility in NVidia drivers that allows you to add some features specific for dual monitors. You want to use that, or some other utility (I use Ultramon) to manage some things like forcing system notification windows to come up in the middle of your main monitor instead of the middle of the desktop (which would be smack dab between your two monitors), stretching one wallpaper across both montors, easily moving windows from one monitor to another, fixing support for maximized windoes in multimon mode, and give you a simple toggle to disable the 2nd monitor (whci hyou want to do when playing 3D games - especially D3D games).