All, I have run a dual-head Matrox for several years now with good success. With the upgrade to XP and a PCI video card I now run three 17" monitors. This gives lots of area to work with, mainly contesting and preparing for an SO2R station. Regards, Mike, NA5U
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mark Mowery AA8TC Sent: Tuesday, April 24, 2007 5:13 PM To: Jerry.Van; DX4WIN Mailing List Subject: [Dx4win] Dual monitors Hi Jerry, I ran into the same problem: between DX4WIN, ARCluster User, MMTTY, and occasionally a web page all open at the same time, a single 17" monitor just wasn't cutting it anymore. I had an old 19" CRT monitor around, so I used that for a while, playing around with font sizes and different resolutions, but in the end it didn't seem to add all that much more useable area. I bought a used Matrox dual-head video card on eBay for $15 (including shipping) so I was able to attach a second 17" monitor. If you have the physical space on your desktop, you'll get much more usable monitor area by going this way than by just increasing the size of your existing monitor. W98SE and later is all ready for dual monitor support with only minimal setup. It's pretty slick: as you move the mouse pointer off one side of one screen it flows smoothly over onto the other monitor. You can even position windows to span both monitors, although I'm not sure why you'd really want to do that, hi. The older Matrox card works perfectly well with my shack computer, which is itself an older Windows98 system, and I had the extra monitor anyway, so $15 and a little setup time is all I have invested. I did have to download the drivers off the internet, but they were still available on the Matrox website. There's more than one maker of dual-head video cards. NVIDIA comes to mind, and I'm sure there's others. You can also add a second used single-head video card and plug a monitor into each card for just about the same amount of money, but there compatibility issues that sometimes come up when you try to plug more than one video card into the same motherboard. If I had another video card laying around, I'd probably try that first, but if I had to buy one, I'd go with a dual-head card. Anyway, food for thought. 73, Mark AA8TC _______________________________________________ Dx4win mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/dx4win From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Wed Apr 25 05:04:36 2007 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Tony Lord) Date: Wed Apr 25 05:10:43 2007 Subject: [Dx4win] Dual monitors In-Reply-To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Dear Jerry, I too had this same problem, lack of screen space, (DX4WIN, HRD, IE, Arswin, LP-100 etc etc) so I installed a second video card (NVIDA) and this had two video outs so with original mother board I now have video outputs and thus 3 TFT screens, it makes life so much easier and as Mark said they are fully integrated the mouse runs smoothly from monitor to monitor. Look at my photo on my QRX.com site. Just make sure you arrange the screen images (in Display Properties/settings) in a straight line otherwise the mouse jumps up/down as it moves from screen to screen. 73's de Tony G8DQZ -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mark Mowery AA8TC Sent: 24 April 2007 23:13 To: Jerry.Van; DX4WIN Mailing List Subject: [Dx4win] Dual monitors Hi Jerry, I ran into the same problem: between DX4WIN, ARCluster User, MMTTY, and occasionally a web page all open at the same time, a single 17" monitor just wasn't cutting it anymore. I had an old 19" CRT monitor around, so I used that for a while, playing around with font sizes and different resolutions, but in the end it didn't seem to add all that much more useable area. I bought a used Matrox dual-head video card on eBay for $15 (including shipping) so I was able to attach a second 17" monitor. If you have the physical space on your desktop, you'll get much more usable monitor area by going this way than by just increasing the size of your existing monitor. W98SE and later is all ready for dual monitor support with only minimal setup. It's pretty slick: as you move the mouse pointer off one side of one screen it flows smoothly over onto the other monitor. You can even position windows to span both monitors, although I'm not sure why you'd really want to do that, hi. The older Matrox card works perfectly well with my shack computer, which is itself an older Windows98 system, and I had the extra monitor anyway, so $15 and a little setup time is all I have invested. I did have to download the drivers off the internet, but they were still available on the Matrox website. There's more than one maker of dual-head video cards. NVIDIA comes to mind, and I'm sure there's others. You can also add a second used single-head video card and plug a monitor into each card for just about the same amount of money, but there compatibility issues that sometimes come up when you try to plug more than one video card into the same motherboard. If I had another video card laying around, I'd probably try that first, but if I had to buy one, I'd go with a dual-head card. Anyway, food for thought. 73, Mark AA8TC _______________________________________________ Dx4win mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/dx4win
