Dual Monitors - Apps, What to do?

kaliyama

Hey,
So I got a new 2007WFP for christmas. Yaay! It's a lot of fun. I now have two monitors. I can plug both in. I have an X1800XT, so i'm about to install hydravision, but I haven't bothered doing anything fancy-pants with my desktop.

* What apps do people like for managing two monitors?

* How have people used it most effectively?

I can see lots of design applications. Do people just turn the second one off for gaming?

cheers..

contraband

ultramon ultramon ultramon

For gaming, you don't gotta turn the second one off. IIRC most games boot to your primary monitor, and your secondary stays on the desktop or wherever it is.

supabeast

Design apps and flight sims are where dual-head love comes in handy. It's also useful when writing research papers using digital sources, because you can surf the web with one screen and write on the other.

Jasconius

Its good to run a game in one screen and internet in the other.

But yeah like you said, its great for design tools because you can see two at once, or for photoshop alone when you can set up all of your toolboxes and pallets on one monitor and your canvas on the other.

blincoln

I tend to use multiple monitors like Tom Cruise's fancy display in Minority report. Basically when I'm working on things I tend to have between two and ten apps open at once, so having multiple displays means I can move them around based on whatever feels intuitive at the time.

I prefer three over two, because I like things to be symmetrical, but not have a frame in the middle of my vision.

If Hydravision supports something like NVidia's software does, you can have your video card make both monitors appear to Windows as a single, REALLY wide screen. The advantage of that is that your task bar will go along the entire bottom, and if your 3D games support changing the Field of View, you can do super-widescreen in them as well. I saw someone do this a different way with the Matrox box that lets you hook up three displays to one output, and then play Oblivion and Counterstrike in Cinerama-style widescreen. You have to be able to change the Field of View though, because otherwise the picture will be distorted.

fforde

contraband wrote:

ultramon ultramon ultramon

I second this recommendation.

For games you will have to set things up on a game by game basis. Most games dont natively support using both monitors at once, but on the other hand, with most games you can do some sort of hack to get it to work.

Rohaq

fforde wrote:

contraband wrote:

ultramon ultramon ultramon

I second this recommendation.

Thirded, hard.

TychoCelchuuu

Rohaq wrote:

fforde wrote:

contraband wrote:

ultramon ultramon ultramon

I second this recommendation.

Thirded, hard.

Quadrupled. I have Ctrl + Alt + M set as a hotkey to enable/disable the secondary monitor, which is pretty nice. I'm using an ATi card but I haven't bothered with Hydravision; UltraMon handles everything.