Dual Monitor HELP!!!

[blubomber]

I have been running a dual monitor setup with some Viewsonic E771s at work. I am using a Radeon 7000 video card with 64MB of RAM. The initial setup was fine and i have been using it for a few months. Well i tried to switch out the monitors the other day and everything went screwy. Depending on what resolution i used and having the desktop extended to the second monitor, the desktop would not fit on the screen. If i moved my mouse down to find the taskbar, the desktop would scroll down until the taskbar came up. So the desktop was too big for the screen but chaning the resolution did not help it. Any ideas on why this happens? I was using a resolution of 2048x1500..something before i went and tried to fix someting that was not broken.

I am also using windows 2000 and tried the latest Catalyst drivers but that caused my system to continuously lock up. Does dual monitors work better under XP? My computer is all messed up now and i need to reinstall.

Thank you for any help.

[DVNT1]

I've seen a setting for the problem you described. I'using W2K wth a Matrox card (dual LCDs) but I can't seem to find that option right now. I think it was named something like "panning".

[douglas55]

You might reduce the res some. I might be to high and it acts like its on a s-video out and you have to move the mouse around to see the whole screen.

[blubomber]

I will check out the panning, that does seem familiar a little. But i am currently backing up the computer so i can reformat and install XP pro.

I will let you know the results and keep panning in mind.

[Peter M]

If you're running Windows 2000, you're possibly running "spanned" mode. This requires both monitors to run at the same logical resolution. Now if one of your monitors can't do the selected resolution physically, you'll get that panning mode you observed.

Lower the common resolution to something your weaker monitor can handle. Or upgrade to Windows XP; this lets you set independent resolutions. W2K has a design oops here, not accounting for the situation where one display unit drives multiple monitors. W2K wants to see one VGA device per monitor.
Matrox worked around that in software with quite a huge effort, while ATi chose to make later units (Radeon 9000 and up) represent themselves as two display units.

Sounds like you have virtual desktop turned on to me, although I don't see a setting for it in my Radeon stuff.