Hi Scott, > Can anyone tell me what graphic cards work well with respect to using > dual monitors and labview? How does the graphic card handle moving the > display data from one monitor to another. I was considering the ATI > Radeon 9800XT. Great for gaming as well. I remember someone talking > about having the diagram window on one machine and the panel window on > another. No more fussing around with the windows to do your work > faster.
We use dual monitors here, using a variety of different graphics cards. I have an nVidia GeForce FX5200 (great card, but take care if you buy one because they do single- and dual-monitor varieties), my boss has a Matrox card of some description, and one of our machines just uses two separate single-display cards. That machine runs XP, which has dual-monitor support built in, so you can use two separate single-display cards instead of a single dual-display card. In all cases, LabVIEW works just fine with them. The software we develop uses a subVI to retain the screen position of VIs and put them back in the same place next time they're launched (using the VI's Windows.Bounds property), and that has no problem coping with the dual display setup. As someone else has noted, XP and Windows 2000 treat dual monitors as one large desktop, so software doesn't need to be aware of which monitor it's running on, it just runs somewhere on that large desktop and neither knows nor cares whether that happens to be on monitor 1 or monitor 2. The only noticable difference between the various solutions we use is the facilities offered by the driver software that comes with the video card(s). My nVidia card comes with an app called nView that allows you to do all sorts of fancy things with your dual monitors, such as enabling window spanning across desktops, choosing which monitor specific apps open on, setting different wallpapers for each monitor and so on. The machine that uses two separate cards and relies on the dual monitor support built into XP lacks these advanced features, although it's still perfectly usable. If you have an XP machine with a spare PCI slot, a spare PCI graphics card and a spare monitor, try plugging the card into the PC and giving it a go - won't cost you anything, and you'll see it first-hand. Try before you buy! :-) > One other off topic question. Have you guys/gals been buying > and using LCD monitors? Anyone running them for a long time? I keep > seeing used monitors show up on ebay that have a few/many lcds burnt out > or broken in the display. How hard and expensive are they to repair if > this is the case? I can solder as I'm a EE by nature. I've got an LCD monitor as my 2nd display - a fairly cheap 15" (1024x768) model that I have pivoted through 90 degrees (another feature supported by the nVidia software), making it great for working on documents. I've had it for about 4 months and haven't had any problems so far with dead pixels. We've got another LCD display that we've had for about a year, again no problems with dead pixels. Not sure how feasible it is to repair a dead pixel. Note that even new LCD monitors may ship with some dead pixels, and most manufacturers specify a tolerance level for dead pixels below which they won't replace a panel. All the best, Simon Whitaker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Software developer, Tiab Ltd tel: +44 (0)1295 714046 fax: +44 (0)1295 712334 web: http://www.tiab.co.uk/
