Dual Monitor Issues

[KennyFlys]

I have an old Emachines T4200, a 2Ghz P-IV machine. It has worked great for five years and only gone through a few OS reloads and one drive replacement. I've used it for a few years with a second monitor on a PCI card. The primary card is an AGI card.

After the last OS reload, everything was fine until I moved and started it up again recently. The second video card was an ATI 7000. It would start with using the second card and not recognize the first. If I pulled the second card, the first card would be be recognized fine.

Once I reinstall the second card, it's back to it and no recognition of the first card. I tried a different card I had, an ATI 9250. That worked fine on both monitors until last night when XP did an automatic update and reboot. Now, it's not recognizing the primary card again.

Does anyone have a solution before I bite the bullet and do a clean OS install?

Fortunately, I don't have much residing on that machine at this time. It's just a pain to do the install, all the updates and software installations to bring it back to usable. I don't have a lot of free time at home, either. I live at the computers writing lesson plans.

[Imagine hair-pulling emoticon] We could use one!

 

[mikea]

Well, if you don't need really hi res on both monitors, you can buy a cheap-now video card that has two video ports.

 

[RJM62]

I've had that happen a bunch of times. Running two dissimilar video cards on the same system is, of course, possible, but I've never found those setups to be particularly stable. Most often, the card that's not set as the initial video card in the BIOS is the one that disappears.

If the card still shows in the Device Manager, you usually can use the "update driver" function to get it working again (even if there's no updated driver). Disabling it and re-enabling also works most of the time, as does uninstalling it (in Device Manager, not physically) and letting Windows re-detect it.

But none of these methods, in my experience, yield permanent joy. A much better solution, as Mike suggested, is a dual-head video card. These can be had quite inexpensively if you don't need very high-end video. (There are also high-end dual-head cards, but they start getting pretty pricey.)

I suggest considering a dual-head AGP card unless you have no AGP slot (that is, if you have integrated AGP with no option to disable it and use an AGP slot). Otherwise, I'd consider a PCI or PCI-E dual-head, and disable AGP in the BIOS. I've found dual-head cards to be a much better solution in the long run.

Rich