[Dx4win] Dual monitors

[Mark Mowery AA8TC]

Hi Jerry,

I ran into the same problem: between DX4WIN, ARCluster User, MMTTY, and 
occasionally a web page all open at the same time, a single 17" monitor just 
wasn't cutting it anymore. I had an old 19" CRT monitor around, so I used 
that for a while, playing around with font sizes and different resolutions, 
but in the end it didn't seem to add all that much more useable area.

I bought a used Matrox dual-head video card on eBay for $15 (including 
shipping) so I was able to attach a second 17" monitor. If you have the 
physical space on your desktop, you'll get much more usable monitor area by 
going this way than by just increasing the size of your existing monitor. 
W98SE and later is all ready for dual monitor support with only minimal 
setup. It's pretty slick: as you move the mouse pointer off one side of one 
screen it flows smoothly over onto the other monitor. You can even position 
windows to span both monitors, although I'm not sure why you'd really want 
to do that, hi.

The older Matrox card works perfectly well with my shack computer, which is 
itself an older Windows98 system, and I had the extra monitor anyway, so $15 
and a little setup time is all I have invested. I did have to download the 
drivers off the internet, but they were still available on the Matrox 
website.

There's more than one maker of dual-head video cards. NVIDIA comes to mind, 
and I'm sure there's others. You can also add a second used single-head 
video card and plug a monitor into each card for just about the same amount 
of money, but there compatibility issues that sometimes come up when you try 
to plug more than one video card into the same motherboard. If I had another 
video card laying around, I'd probably try that first, but if I had to buy 
one, I'd go with a dual-head card.

Anyway, food for thought.

73,
Mark AA8TC