Hacks and Gadgets by HJL

I have been running multiple monitors on Windows XP for quite a while, but recently had some problems getting Windows Vista to run with multiple displays. My main requirement is for lots of screen real estate and decent 2-d performance, since I don’t generally play video games and usually have dozens of document windows open at the same time.

The typical setup I’ve been running for desktop PCs has been a 3-headed configuration, with the video from the motherboard’s chipset running one display while two more video outputs come from an additional card. This has been simple to get going on WinXP, usually just requiring whatever cheap dual-output card is on sale at Frys and away we go. I took the same approach to adding multiple displays to a prebuilt Windows Vista system, and was gradually convincing myself that I could only run either the integrated graphics, or the two video displays from the additional card, since I could get one or the other to work but not both.

It turns out that running multiple video displays is actually pretty easy on Windows Vista, but only if all the displays are running the same underlying graphics driver, i.e. the video chipsets need to be from the same vendor and generally pretty recent. I had initially dropped in whatever video card was lying around, which turned out to be different than what was on the motherboard.

Lately I’ve been using the HP Pavilion a61xx and a63xx boxes as generic prebuilt systems. They come with Nvidia GeForce 6150SE nForce 430 chipset for integrated video. I have been adding a generic Nvidia GeForce 7300 card for around $70 (from Frys) with good results. I probably should have known better than to throw some random video card in there and expect it to work, but that works just fine on WinXP.

Microsoft - Multimonitor Support and Windows Vista