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I was following a thread the other day about laptops Vs Desktops and one of the points made, I think from Birddog, was that you can use two monitors on one computer.
I know nothing about this kind of thing and I would be very interested if someone could help me understand.
1. How it is done?
2. What other equipment do you need?
3. What are the benefits?

Thanks in advance for your replies.

I run two monitors but it is on a mac. If you are using a PC all you need is a video card with dual output - now remember I am not an expert on PC’s and it is quite possible I am wrong but I am sure someone will either agree with me or point you in the right direction

Most recent mid-high end video cards will have dual outputs on them (Usually a DVI port and VGA port). Most video drivers have dual monitor support built in, and with a recent version of windows (2k or xp) it's easy to get it going.

There's also some 3rd party software (Ulrtamon) that makes dealing with 2 monitors alot easier once you initially get 'em going.

Ok, so what is the benefit, can you for example set it up so that you have two windows open, one on each screen?

phillipb wrote:Ok, so what is the benefit, can you for example set it up so that you have two windows open, one on each screen?

Absolutely. You could, for example, have photoshop open with all your palettes on one screen and the image on its own on the other screen. Of course you need the hardware and the desk space

I have dual monitors.. It's brilliant. If I could help it, I'd never go back to using just one monitor.

I dabble in Visual Basic occasionally, and it's brilliant to have the extra space.. eg. toolbars on one monitor, and the coding window in the other.

It also comes in handy when you need to be reading one thing eg. a webpage, while doing another.. eg. Using Word.

There's a million and one uses.. Essentially, you double your desktop. You can also drag a window from one monitor to another. Kinda cool

I love it.

i have two 21" monitors running from the PC and its great,have photoshop
open on one screen,ACD on the other,IE on one screen,email on the other
etc.

see attached pic,click on thumbnail to see bigger pic


<a href="http://img149.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img149&image=dsc00013fi.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://img149.exs.cx/img149/562/dsc00013fi.th.jpg" border="0" alt="Free Image Hosting at http://www.ImageShack.us" /></a>

I think I'm staring to get this, obviously you need some sort of software to tell the computer what's going on?
One other thing, Say I have a desktop and a laptop, can I do the same thing or is that networking two computers and a completely different scenario.

Sorry to ask all these non photo related questions, but I feel more comfortable asking the people in this forum than enywhere else.

If you've got a reasonably recent laptop and an external monitor plugged into it and you are running XP then you should be able to do this without any more expense.

Open you laptop. Hit the function key on your laptop so that both the laptop monitor and the external monitor are working (Fn F4 on my Compaq).

Then right click on your desktop. Go to Properties. From here you'll have to work it out for yourself (I'm at home now and my PC doesn't have dual monitors here). Basically you need to just switch on the Dual Monitors option and select your primary screen.

There are some software packs that do this better than XP but it's not a bad low cost starting point.

The cheapest way to do this to get a cheap second graphics card.
or if your PC has an inbuilt VGA card get a decent VGA card and insert into your MB (hopefully you MB has a AGP Slot).

You need to refer to you MB manual to see what AGP it supports.

And then let your XP or 2000 OS do the rest. PS it is great to have 2 x 21 inch monitors, but you can have two different size monitors.

21inch for main screen and and the old 14inch in the basement.

Kingsley's photo there illustrates just how handy it can be!

If you have a laptop and desktop, just unhook the monitor from the desktop and plug it into your laptop. Keep your laptop open, so its inbuilt display is also on, as well as the external monitor. And even the default graphics solution built in to entry-level models have the ability to seamlessly output to the two displays.

Also, why stop at two? You can have triple monitors, or quadruple....

Your Idea seems a good one Onyx, except for one thing, the laptop is a PII so I couldn't possibly use it as the main machine for PP.