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by Doug Dow
I recently had the opportunity to expand my workstation to a dual-monitor configuration. Why would I want to do that? Well, how many times have you had to compare documents, but not had enough screen real estate to avoid clicking back and forth between applications? Have you ever had so many windows and applications open that navigating among them was nearly impossible? Welcome to single-monitor hell. My quest was for multiple-monitor nirvana, spurred on by colleagues who'd been to the multiple-monitor mountaintop.
It was a task I had to undertake myself, since there are no IT technicians at my workplace. This is the story of the travails I encountered as I struggled to get the two flat-panel monitors to cooperate. My hope is that I spare some people the problems I had.
Plug 'n Play?
My division completed a series of hardware upgrades when they delivered a new Dell flat-panel monitor to my desktop to complement the Dell GX620 PC already there. Since I had a Samsung flat-panel already, and many friends had extolled the joys of a dual-monitor system, I hoped it would be fairly easy to add the second monitor. After all, Windows XP had made things much easier, right?
Who's Driving?
What made me believe that my task would be easy is that my device list showed two video drivers on my system. There are two ways to discover this. Use the path Control Panel > Appearance and Themes > Display to reach the Settings tab on the Display Properties window. If there are two numbered rectangles, numbered 1 and 2, respectively, the video card has two drivers. Just beneath the two rectangles, a drop box lists the details of the drivers. (This is a box I did not discover until well into my saga.)
The Display Properties window, with drop-down box active. Originally, the two drivers listed were two identical Intel(R) 82945G Express Chipset Family drivers.
Another way to check is to view the System Properties window (Control Panel > Performance and Maintenance > System). On the Hardware tab, click Device Manager. The resulting list, on my system, showed two drivers under the Display Adapter entry. This led me to believe that adding the second monitor would be easy. Plug 'n play.
S 'Porting Life
Despite the single VGA port on my system, the presence of two video drivers surely meant that plugging my second monitor into the "VGA out" of the first monitor would cause the system to find the second monitor and, bingo, dual monitors, right? Wrong. Monitor 2 displayed a duplicate of the image on monitor 1, just as if I were in the TV aisle of a department store, all screens showing the same image.
(You test this by clicking the Identify button on the Settings tab on the Display Properties window. When you do so, immense white numerals appear on your screen, indicating which terminal is the primary, secondary, and so on. If there are two immense 1s, more work needs to be done.)
Someone suggested a Y-cord. I went to the office supply store and found a VGA Y-cord that enabled the single "VGA out" on my computer to have two "VGA outs." Now, I know that this sounds terribly naive. It just means that, now in the 21st century, we expect our hardware to be smarter. The result was the same: two monitor 1 images.
I searched on the Web to gain more understanding of dual monitoring. The Dell site provided some troubleshooting advice: "the Intel chipset... disables onboard video when an AGP card is inserted into the AGP slot." I would need to either add a PCI video card, or an AGP card with dual video outputs. AGP? PCI? The alphabet soup was getting thick. But I concluded the single VGA outlet was not enough.
I was hesitant to add a second video card to the company's PC, so I shopped for an alternative. I found an intriguing device at a computer store, called a High Speed USB VGA Adapter. Using a USB port on the computer, it would connect my second monitor, and voila!
News Item: Driver Flattens Acrobat
And it worked! But the driver install was a little shaky (primitive), so I ignored a lengthy but poorly written warning with words to the effect, "If you install this, Adobe Acrobat won't work anymore...." Now, PDFs are my bread and butter. But I was intent on following this thing through, so I clicked Continue.
I plugged monitor 2 into its USB to VGA cable, and XP announced the detection of new hardware! It worked. Now, on the Display Properties - Settings window, there were three rectangles where there had once been two. In order, they displayed as 1, 3, and 2. Pressing the Identify button, which up to this point had stubbornly revealed only 1s, I saw a 1 on monitor 1, and a 3 on monitor 2. What a thrill!
And, sure enough, I could extend my display. I joyfully dragged my mainframe computer sessions onto my second screen and played gleefully with screen resolutions, which I could control from my taskbar. Finally, I was in the nirvana of dual monitoring.
But all was not well. By week's end I had to generate some reports and convert them to PDF. And when I clicked the Adobe icon, an ugly message appeared, to the effect that "PrintOptimized(1)" could not be found in a CAB file. I tried opening Adobe Acrobat 7 and opening the Word file, but the same message stopped me. "Cheapo driver," I thought. I found that if I reinstalled Acrobat 7, I could generate the PDF. But I had to reinstall it after every boot-up. And I was booting up more than Imelda Marcos at Western Warehouse.
Finally, I removed the USB-VGA driver and the device to fly single-monitor for a while. A new problem arose. The mainframe sessions I'd dragged onto the second monitor were no longer visible!
Carded
After consulting with my supervisor, I went back to the local computer store to shop for a video card. Surely a more mature device and driver would play better in my system. The many boxes and manufacturers of video cards took me an eternity to sort out. The terminology became confusing, as I tried to determine if "dual monitor capable" and "twin monitor capable" meant the same thing. Given price and feature considerations, I finally selected one (the Radeon 9250 PCI Graphics Card), and installed it and its drivers the next week.
Alas, a similar, but clearer message appeared on install: Adobe Type Manager is not compatible with dual screen technology. Hmm. The first time around, I'd removed Acrobat 4, legacy software, and that seemed to help. Does Adobe Acrobat 7 use the ATM?
This card, meanwhile, had not one but three video outputs—one each of VGA, S-Video, and the new DVI, for digital flat- panel display. But only one of each. Surely this new "dual monitor capable" card could feed both monitors if the connections were compatible. Off I went at lunchtime, back to the office supply store. Sure enough, they had a DVI to VGA connector, which I snatched up for $25.00. To shorten the story, I was back to two number 1s when I clicked Identify in my Display Properties window.
But, I now had not two, not three, but four rectangles of various sizes showing in the Display Settings tab. And, at this point, I discovered the one-line drop-down box underneath the rectangles. There, all four drivers, two for the original (IBM) video card, and two for the Radeon video card, were detailed in full. It began to become clear to me that each card would support only one display. And, for that to work, one of each of the drivers on each card would have to be disabled.
Disabled?
Yes, disabled. You can do this in either the above-mentioned drop-down list, or in the afore-mentioned hardware list (see "Who's Driving," above). The hardware list is much easier. From XP's Control Panel menu, select Performance and Maintenance > System. On the Hardware tab, click Device Manager. If necessary, click the "+" in front of the Display adapters entry to show the list of adapters. In my system there were two each for Intel Express Chipset and for Radeon 9250. Right-click one of each type. If currently enabled, there's a choice to disable. Disable one of each type (a red X will mark out the icon), making sure one of each type is enabled.
The Device Manager window, with red X's indicating disabled display adapters. Further down, three Plug and Play Monitors are shown. I don't know why.
Whew. You can also do this from the Display Settings window, but that would take several pages to describe. Hint: It begins with Advanced.
The Case of the Missing Mainframe Sessions
With my adapter now properly installed and configured, and the four rectangles reduced to two in my Display Settings, it remained to see what had become of my mainframe sessions.
The IBM Mainframe emulators allow a user to invoke many instances of a mainframe session, so even though my A and B sessions had gone AWOL, clicking the desktop icon a third and fourth time brought up sessions C and D, which allowed me to log on and do my work. Yet, sessions A and B popped up in my toolbar, but could not be maximized.
I noticed eventually that when moving my cursor from one screen to the other, the mouse pointer disappeared for a long period of time. I was moving the mouse, but the pointer took forever to go from one screen to the other. Finally, I discovered that as I moved through this "black hole," one or the other of my A and B session toolbar buttons would change color, or change from blinking to static. My sessions had fallen into the great void!
How? I theorize that the A and B sessions had inherited placement settings from back when I had the first device, the one with the USB connector and the single third screen. Screen 3 had popped up between the original screens 1 and 2 in my Display Settings rectangles. People: these rectangles are trying to tell you something! Each rectangle represents one display, and the number indicates which monitor session (primary, secondary, tertiary...) is used on each display. When screen 3 went away, sessions A and B didn't know where else to go.
With session A, I got lucky. Carefully moving the mouse, I found the screen's title bar, and after eight or ten attempts, fished it out of the void and onto my primary screen. Session B took about 50 or more attempts. Why didn't they find their way to my new dual display? Because it's IBM/MS and not Mac? I also believe (as I write this a full two weeks after the events described) that I had to realign rectangles 1 and 2 once I'd disabled 3 and 4. If I had enabled 1 and 3, rather than 1 and 2, perhaps the migration might have gone more smoothly.
Order, order!
In computers, order of operations is everything. Panic-stricken users like me, diverted by software failures, inscrutable messages, and intervening tasks, will suffer the consequences of disorderly installs. In the intervening weeks, I've had to install FrameMaker 6.0 (ATM!), and reinstall Adobe Acrobat 7 repeatedly. Depending on the order, I may have stumbled on a combination that allows PDF creation both from Word and from FrameMaker (through Postscript). Even if not, it's worth the effort of reinstalling Acrobat each week to stay in the nirvana of dual monitoring.