Really stuck with dual monitor issue. Please help

[Dofarlow]

Hello

I'm attempting to set up a dual monitor system. My primary video card being used an AGP Nvidia Geforce 2 mx 32MB. I recently acquired a couple of pci video cards so i thought I'd try to set up a dual display system. I installed the PCI card and let windows XP Pro detect the new hardware. It tried to install the drivers, but i got a message saying that there was a problem and it may not function properly. I then tried the other 2 PCI video cards. same result. Next I went into my bios and changed the primary display to PCI instead of AGP to see if it would come up at all. Windows XP booted up great through the monitor hooked up to the PCI card, but now nothing on the AGP. When i went into device manager, for the first time, it didn't show any error messages. I'm really not sure what I'm doing wrong. I'm stuck and open to any advice you all might have. Thanks in advance!!

 

[Rankor]

What are the PCI video cards from? ATI or Nvidia? and what specific model?

 

[Dofarlow]

I have 3 total that I've tried. All with the exact same results. here are the PCI cards:

ATI 3D Rage II+
Diamond Stealth 3D 2000
Diamond Stealth 64 Video

Once again, I really appreciate the help.

 

[Peter]

These are all very old cards that aren't multi-display capable, in that they can't release the "VGA compatibility" range of resources. Meaning that they won't run as a secondary card.

You either need to set your BIOS to make the PCI VGA the primary display (see PCI/PnP page), or use cards with later chips that can pull that trick.

 

[Dofarlow]

Thank you very much Peter. That seems to clear things up quite a bit. So if I make PCI VGA the primary display in the bios, then use my AGP Geoforce 2 MX 32MB for the secondary, do you think that would work? I tried this earlier, and when it booted up to windows xp pro on the PCI card, there didn't seem to be any conflicts with video devices in the device manager, but I still couldn't get anything up on my AGP card monitor. The Geforce 2 wouldn't be too old would it? If i set it up this way, how do i get the second monitor to work? Thanks again for all the help. I don't know ehere else to turn.

 

[Peter]

For Windows, it doesn't matter which card is primary and which is secondary. The important thing is that you can't make a card secondary that can't keep its backward compatibility "legacy VGA" stuff disabled.

That sorted, Windows should load drivers for all the graphics devices it finds, and let you extend your desktop on all of them. That's the plan.

edit: The important bit is you need to have drivers installed for all of them. As long as Windows is still running in compatibility VGA mode, you can't do multi-display either.

 

[Dofarlow]

Thanks again Peter

I don't mean to sound stupid, but I'm not sure I understand the whole part about Windows "running in compatability VGA mode" how do i know if it is doing this and if it is, how do i change it? I really appreciate all the help.

 

[Dofarlow]

Still struggling with an answer to this one. if anyone has any advice, I'd certainly appreciate it.

 

[Dofarlow]

What would be the best PCI card that I could get at a reasonable price that you think would work to accomplish this task. Please remember, that I won't be doing anything graphics intensive, and I'm looking for the cheapest solkution possible. THanks again for all the help.