Dual Monitor in XP Problems

[griobhta]

hello folks,

An annoying problem with XP. I recently got my hands on a second vga card. An 8mb SIS 305. With a view to getting a dual monitor set up. My other card is a geForce2MX. I uninstalled the drivers for my mx using the properties in the device manager. Rebooted and made sure it was detected as a standard vga card.

I then added my PCI card. PC booted up fine. XP was using my PCI card as the main one. I installed the drivers for the pci card then rebooted and once i activated both monitors in the display preferences every thing worked.

Then the trouble started I tried to update my nVidia drivers to the latest and oon reboot i only had one monitor working. I went through hours of uninstalling and re-installing drivers and couldnt get it to work again. There were a couple of times when i had both cards working with xp on one minitor and a pink screen on the other. Which is what happened the first time before i activated the second screen, but there was no option in the display properties to activate it.

Eventualy i found that the 305 is not listed as compatible with dual monitor support in XP, the current version is a well hidden document. However the fact that i had it all working once leaves me to think that it should work again.

Any ideas?

g

[TGK MCP]

Try going into your BIOS settings and change the default display to the PCI. In Windows make the AGP card your primary. The PC will boot on the PCI screen then when Windows loads up it will switch to the AGP as primary with the PCI as the secondary.
I hope this helps you. I struggled with this for a day or two on my father in laws new PC. I made the mistake of getting him hooked on dual monitors about a year ago.;) So going back to one for a few days was a major headache for him.

[griobhta]

Thanks for the reply.

Well what i finally ended up doing was swapping the card for an old TNT and it all worked a charm. Since then i have had a fairly significant upgrade and now have a radeon 9500 pro which handles the 2 monitors on its own.

Only problem i had was that the Hauppauge tv app kept crashing my system. So now use dScaler which is great but doesnt have dual monitor support just yet.

g