dual monitor wackiness

VoodooV

so my office recently decided that everyone *must* have dual monitors. It's apparently no longer an issue of whether or not the individual can make use of it or prefers alt-tab. Its become this hot button topic that's grown too big to stop and use such silly things such as reason on.

Anyway. Instead of buying a cheap expansion video card that has dual output and disabling the onboard video. My coworker has decided to buy a cheap ATI card with one output and use that alongside the onboard intel card

Does anyone know if ATI software and intel video software play nice with each other? I'm sure the drivers themselves will be fine. But I always worry about the extra software that gets added on.

Ruckus

You should be able to download the basic drivers minus the control software from ATI, and probably from Intel as well. Even if you did have both software packages installed, your most likely problem would mostly be slowdown from the extra resources the software uses.

Also, the expansion card better be PCI, because most Onboards use the AGP bus, so you can't use an onboard and an AGP card at the same time.

ViolentChemistry

Wait, they're requiring you to use dual-monitors, but you have to buy the hardware?

VoodooV

ViolentChemistry wrote: »

Wait, they're requiring you to use dual-monitors, but you have to buy the hardware?

Nah, We're the IT department, but the decision to go dual monitors was not by us, but by our new Administrator of our entire agency. We have to implement it. So we're just adding in a dual output card to all our new PCs, but we also have to upgrade our existing PCs too

I want to buy a PCI dual output card and disable the onboard card. My coworkers want save like..50 bucks or something per card and buy a single output card and use it in conjunction with the onboard card. I figure if they're going to waste all this money on dual monitors whether or not we want it. why half ass it now? Might as well spend a few extra bucks to get the dual output card so that ONE card is running the show instead of two dissimilar ones.

I know I'm probably just picking at nits. I just figure with one card instead of two, there would be lesser chances of software conflicts.

A large part of our operations staff are older people in their 50's and have their resolution cranked down all the way to 800x600 so to see them with dual monitors, seems just....sad. Not to mention the users who are barely computer literate. They have a hard enough time using one monitor. When it comes right down to it though. It just seems like for every one person who can use a 2nd monitor efficiently, there are nine who just have the 2nd monitor as a status symbol.

add to it that we're state gov't. So IMO it's just a large waste of time and taxpayers dollars for small benefit