Need help with dual monitors in XP please

[MrDudeMan]

ive looked around but i didnt find any previous posts...so here it goes


i have a voodoo5 5500 AGP and an S3 Trio64V+ PCI card (very old i think...)

anyways, i hooked them both up, not knowing a thing about this, and when i booted up at first, the screen popped up on my smaller monitor which is connected to the Trio (which was odd, it came to the PCI card first) but whatever i though, maybe that is normal

it gets into windows and at the password screen, i tried to turn my big monitor off and on to make them both show, and it "stole" the image from the smaller one lol. so i was on my big monitor and i got into windows, i went to help and support, typed in dual monitors, blahblah and i got the other one to turn on also

when it was on, none of the icons would show and after about 3 minutes it crapped out and i had to restart

i restarted, both of them turned on at once after it was in the operating system, but before that only the small one worked in the booting up screen again (the Trio, not the voodoo5)

it crapped out again


so i took it off and here i am asking for help

how do i make them different desktops? i mean how it was...it was just looking like an extension of the desktop to the right, not really a separate one

no icons on it, when i brought the mouse over to the smaller monitor, i could right click, but when i hit menu, it came up on the big screen


so what do i do to make this not crash and function like different desktops?

in short, how do i make this work? thanks

 

[GrumpyMan]

Get a dual head card.

 

[MrDudeMan]

you mean a card with a dual monitor output? i dont have that kind of money, cant i make it work with 2 video cards?

 

[BD231]

BUMP, I also want to know if you can use 2 seprate video cards for dual monitor

 

[GrumpyMan]

I have a VT G3 and a Voodoo Banshee on mine. I can extend the desktop with different refresh and screen resolutions. But I don't think you can make two separate desktops unless you have a dual head card or there is some software to do that with that I'm not familiar with yet.

 

[MrDudeMan]

hm, well im curious to know how to do this at all...bump for a good cause here!

thanks so far

 

[bassoprofundo]

The Trio card (as well as most older S3 cards) won't work in a dual monitor configuraton for architectural reasons. You're best to find an old Matrox Millenium I or II or even a Voodoo 3 2000 to slap in instead. They're nice and cheap, and they work flawlessly in dual monitor configs. The Matrox will even give you some extra dual display features if you load their Powerdesk software (even if the primary card isn't Matrox.)

 

[AA0]

A radeon VE is cheap, that would be your best bet. Does anyone know if its possible to get the cards to display two different desktops? I know you can have two desktops and flip back and forth, but I'm looking to get one look on one monitor, and another on the second.

 

[CStroman]

You need to go into your BIOS and set your "Video Init First" to "AGP" in order for your Voodoo5 to be your primary monitor.