“Plug and Play” on Windows

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I had occasion to reinstall Windows2000 the other day and got a chance to see what the rest of the world endures when using anything but the most basic standard peripheral devices.

I have a two monitor setup, one a Dell 17″ flat screen, nothing special. The other is a 19″ Dell UltraSharp.

My reinstall was done from a ghost image, made from the install disk that came with the machine. A stripped, basic reinstall, which only had my network settings and network software added on, so at least I didn’t have to do that again.

So, the reinstall went quickly, but then came the endless trips to Windows update, restarts, and back to Windows update for more. Quite a few of the updates have to be installed separately, then the machine restarted.

Oh, did I forget to mention, after the reinstall, the left monitor, the digital Dell Ultrasharp, was black. I figured it would be OK, once I got around to opening the display control panel and setting it to use both monitors.

However… one of the updates was an update from Nvidia, the maker of the Quadro video card I have. So I accepted that one, then when the updates were finally finished I attempted to get the second monitor going again. No matter what I did, it would not show up in the dropdown menu in the control panel. So…

I went to nvidia.com, got THEIR latest driver for the card, and installed that. Now here is the good part!

This is where I found the setting that finally worked (and Mac users, try not to laugh too hard…)

Control Panels –> Displays (because this is where I set it when I first got the computer) –> Advanced–> Quadro4 700 XGL–> Open pop out side menu to LEFT of control panel –> click on “nView Display Mode”–> nView Mode–> Horizontal Span –> then fiddle with which display gets “primary” setting for about 10 minutes, if set to wrong one, one monitor goes black, instead of simply switching the task bar around.

Pitiful.

Sometime I’ll post on the interesting discrepancies in several applications depending on which monitor your cursor is in. Things like permissions change in Groupwise, buttons cease to work in Adobe Premiere, etc.