Matrox G550 dual display problem

[VERT]

A client has one of these in their PC, hooked up to a 17" CRT and 15" LCD, they had the dualhead display mode set on Clone and needed it to be set on extended desktop for an experiement, I set this up for them - I ticked the box to extend the desktop. When we had finished this little experiment I set it back to Clone - unticked the extend desktop box and all was good until a couple of days later.

Now I can only get it to extend the desktop onto the other monitor (box ticked) it just refuses to Clone if I untick the box and disables the other monitor. Upon further inspection there isn't any options to set the 2nd monitor onto Clone anyways.

How do I set up this video card so that it will Clone the desktop onto the other monitor?

[Kruzin]

If the drivers are properly installed, there is a tab in the advanced display properties for what dualhead mode you want to use (display properties>settings>advanced>featues>clone mode).

[VERT]

hmm I dont have that features option, I will try updating the drivers

[VERT]

I have updated to the latest drivers, but I still dont have that option - I cant understand why I cant set this to clone mode - its quite fustrating.

The desktop wallpaper clones accross but nothing else does and if I was to move the mouse cursor to the far right of the primary display it will appear on the secondary display.

In the options it still says clone is disabled, but yet there is no option to enable it. Can someone please help me with this.

other people here must own this video card or similar

[PresterJohn]

i have seen a similar problem (symptoms included cases where some dual-head features not showing) with some g450 configs.

my recommendation is to d/l the matrox uninstaller to completely remove the video driver. reboot afterwards.

what OS are you using? if it's w2k or xp, let the OS load the native drivers.

i had some weird cases when some minor video problems occured (icons not showing in hi-color,etc). i wound up having to use an older ms certified driver (d/l'ed from matrox). another one was solved by first selecting single-crt display config on the driver install and adding the secondary display support afterwards.

i know it sounds weird, but as you can tell in your own case...sometimes weird stuff happens.

[VERT]

double post

[VERT]

I found out that if I set up a hot key I could enable and disable Clone mode on demand - damb that is clever and very useful