Dual monitor possible?

[Liam Proven]

On 05/10/2007, Ashley Benton <meggalen at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think it is build in the motherboard, there is no card just a pink thing
> (sorry don't know the name) plug into the motherboard

Ah. Now, forgive me, but if you mentioned that before, I didn't notice
it. Which is a shame, because I think it's an absolutely critical bit
of information.

In my experience, on a lot of machines, if you have what are called
"integrated graphics" - that means, the graphic chip is built into the
motherboard, not on a separate card - then there is circuitry in the
motherboard logic which will automatically disable the onboard
graphics when you insert a graphics card.

It sounds to me like that's what's happening here. On such machines it
is, as far as I know, *impossible* to use the integrated graphics
/and/ an additional graphics card simultaneously.
Sorry about that. It's a pain, but alas, multiple monitor support is a
fairly new thing on the PC - it's less than a decade old as a
mass-market thing. Macs, of course, have been doing it for twenty
years.

(Historical aside: although you could run multiple Matrox Millennium
cards under WinNT4 for a big desktop, this was a special feature of
Matrox's NT4 drivers. Windows just saw a single big wide screen. The
functionality for use with random mix-and-match cards was only
introduced with Windows 98, didn't start to get used much until
Windows 2000 and only became remotely mainstream with Windows XP.)

I think you're stuck, and by the sound of it, unless you're short of
RAM, you'd probably be better off with your built-in graphics. I'd
suggest buying a more modern nVidia card with twin monitor outputs. I
expect you'd pick one up for the price of a beer on eBay.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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