winxp dual display woes

[Quinton]

Because they were crazy cheap and shipping was free, I went overboard and bought myself two dell 2408 24" 1920x1200 flatpanels for myself, for the holidays.  Now I finally have display parity with work again!  They great with the latest drivers for my nvidia geforce 7950 display card.

However, there is a problem that I can't figure out -- I really want to be able to run a game "fullscreen" on one display while I have other stuff (teamspeak, web browser, ssh/irc clients) on the other display.  The new nvidia drivers offer a "dual" mode that does just this, but winxp defeats me.  Whenever I click on something on the secondary display, windows insists on minimizing the "fullscreen" app on the primary display (because, "duh you gotta minimize the fullscreen thing first, right?" thinks winxp, I guess).

Is there some way to stop windows from doing this?

[lac]

I have the same thing going on. I had to settle for running stuff windowed after looking around a bit for a solution.

[Scadente]

Hai, I'm running a dual screen setup. And yes, at times it can be a bitch.

To solve the "full-screen" thing, it really depends on what app you are running. Games/Apps which allow you to play in windowed mode are a blessing here. Since you can then full-screen the windowed App, it will act as a full-screen wo minimizing. This often shows how gifted a given apps coders are ;) Because some apps behave very strangely in windowed mode, with performance drops and all.

So traditional "full-screen" apps don't work too well, unless you window them and then maximize that window, which at times drops performance heavilly.

In short:
Experiement!

[Big Gulp]

Is there some way to stop windows from doing this?

Not that I'm aware of, it does it in Vista x64 as well.  The only game that doesn't is WoW, and that's because I run it in windowed mode (although it still looks fullscreen).  Yeah, it is a pain in the ass, though.

[bhodi]

As I said in the other thread, and have in the past, your best bet isn't to use a dual headed setup. Drivers suck for it and you can't do anything in fullscreen on the second monitor anyway. Just hook up one monitor to a spare computer or laptop and connect them with synergy. It works better than my dual headed setup ever did.

To prevent the mouse from wandering off screen while you're looking around (interestingly, some games do this and some games don't, it has to be how they did mouse hooks), I selected a 'tap' option, where I have to hit the side twice in something like 200ms. So you just tap and it moves over, preventing accidental shifting. You get used to it fast.

[Engels]

Just hook up one monitor to a spare computer or laptop and connect them with synergy.

what is synergy?

[bhodi]

what is synergy?

synergy: [noun] a mutually advantageous conjunction of distinct elements

Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s).

Redirecting the mouse and keyboard is as simple as moving the mouse off the edge of your screen. Synergy also merges the clipboards of all the systems into one, allowing cut-and-paste between systems. Furthermore, it synchronizes screen savers so they all start and stop together and, if screen locking is enabled, only one screen requires a password to unlock them all. Learn more about how it works.

Synergy is open source and released under the GNU Public License (GPL).

System Requirements

    * Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me (the Windows 95 family)
    * Microsoft Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP (the Windows NT family)
    * Mac OS X 10.2 or higher
    * Unix
          o X Windows version 11 revision 4 or up
          o XTEST extension
            (use "xdpyinfo | grep XTEST" to check for XTEST)

[Big Gulp]

The problem with something like Synergy is that it can't do what dual monitors on a single card can do, mainly segregating, but still keeping unified one desktop.  Being able to review, cut and paste from a doc on the right screen while writing another doc on the left is awesome, and you can't do it between two machines.  Likewise, something like Photoshop where I can drag all my palettes to the right and just use the left for one big workspace are undoable on a two computer setup.

[Engels]

From the sounds of it, Synergy does let you cut and paste from one machine to the other through the shared clipboard funtion. Probably wouldn't work for your Photoshop scenario, of course. And other issues, such as shared disk space, for instance, could be solved through a shared network drive or some such.

In any event, on a 7950 card, you really don't want to be playing higher end games on it in split cpu mode. That card was really meant to act with both GPUs working in tandem. Anything above WoW and you're really asking a lot of the single GPUs on those cards, which are significantly less powerful than a single 7900, for instance.

[Scadente]

Not that I'm aware of, it does it in Vista x64 as well.  The only game that doesn't is WoW, and that's because I run it in windowed mode (although it still looks fullscreen).  Yeah, it is a pain in the ass, though.

LotrO and WAR also worked fine in maximized window mode for me, although there was a small bar at the top of my screen that rendered my desktop and not the game, it wasn't too annoying . Supreme Commander has a nice dual screen feature in it, I've heard but not checked out yet.

But games like Civilization and Europa Universalis, that require alot of mouse-at the edge of the screen action can be highly annoying to play in maximized window mode.

The Dual Head option sounds sexy, and I'll be sure to check it out once I buy a second pc and move into more permanent accomodations.

[Big Gulp]

LotrO and WAR also worked fine in maximized window mode for me, although there was a small bar at the top of my screen that rendered my desktop and not the game, it wasn't too annoying .

Remember the good old days when Verant wouldn't let you alt-tab because l33t h4x0rs could fuck with the game?  Good times, good times.