Dual Monitors

I have a Sony Vaio desktop I would like to add a second monitor to. I have a Sony LCD monitor (#1)and someone gave me a Dell LCD (#2) the same size. It looks great and I had an extra Stealth 3D video card laying around I wanted to use. I put the stealth card in the PCI slot but no drivers were found. The comp booted up ok and tried to install the drivers. When I hooked up the 2nd monitor to it the comp booted up but used monitor #2 and monitor #1 stayed black. If I unhook monitor #2 it uses monitor #1 again as normal.

I looked on the net for advice but as in most places they explain how easy it is to do but never leave any room for error if anything goes wrong. I guess so many different systems make it difficult to standardize any sort of install generalized help.

Anybody know how to do this?

reply to post by Dirty Vegas

I'm not sure I can answer your question but I -can- tell you how I have mine hooked up.

My monitor came with two cables, a digital and an analog. My video card has both a digital and an analog port. Thus I plug into these and the signal is instantly recognize, no config needed.

Is this the same thing you're doing? If so it may be that your video card is too old or something. It's a snap to buy a video card, say via newegg (not affil) and it will be shipped with drivers.

HTH.

reply to post by Dirty Vegas


In your bios you should have the option to tell it what video card to use. AGP or PCI. Some motherboards will disable the onboard when a second card is used. Old cheap Dells were like that. I bet someone out there has drivers for whatever OS you have for that PCI card but I would just skip it all together. You can still get good AGP cards that support two displays. Mine runs two monitors and has a third port to send video to the TV if need be. Getting a faster AGP card with dual monitor support will be better than running a 10 year old card on a slower system bus.

I am going to trade my Radeon x1950 in for a HIS Hightech Radeon HD 3850 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 AGP HDCP Ready

Ability to run HDMI and DirectX 10. For $200 it keeps my old 478 mobo useful for a few a year or two.

www.newegg.com...

I was typing, but after reading a reply, I then I looked up the video card Stealth 3D video card.

To be honest, it may work out by changing some BIOS settings, but you aren't going to get much performance from the card. It doesn't have much video memory, which will probably be lacking for todays software. For simple browsing and word processing tasks, and simple games it might be ok.

I think you would be happier just shelling out a little cash for a more recent dual monitor video card. You should be able to pick one up on E-bay for a small amount of money. You could buy used if you don't have a lot of cash. I would look for one with at least 128 Megs of RAM, if you are going to try and play some modern games on it. You really need more than this for the newer games to run good.

And, you should buy AGP since it's faster, unless you happen to have PCI-e, which would be even faster.

If you have no interest in games, or graphical programs, then you can skimp a little on performance.

Troy