2 TFT screens on 1 PC... connected to DVI ?

I have a PC with a 19" TFT monitor. The Videocard in the PC has 2 DVI ports..., should it be possible to connect an extra 17" TFT monitor ?

19" to work in Simatic and a 17" to open cad drawings ... ?

Thanks in forward for any advise

You should be able to. You may need a different video driver. If you have the one that came with the card you have, you should be set. Right click on your desktop screen and go to SETTINGS. There should be a pull down that lets you assign settings for each monitor. I am assuming you are running XP professional.

Hey

It's a dell precision 390.

The Videocard has 2 DVI's, but in the settings I can't find anything to activate a second screen..., maybe I should just connect it and see ?

It's Windows XP.

If u need to know what videocard, I can look tomorow, it's on a PCI express port, don't know much out of my head right now

regards

If you have 2 DVI outputs, it shouldn't be a problem. I run 2 19" monitors on my Dell desktop with a nVidia GeForce 7900 Graphics card. When programming or doing cad, I put all the tool bars on one monitor and have the other for actual work.

You need to find out exactly what video card you have and get the latest drivers for it.

Windows (and specifically, the Video Card), generally must actually detect a connected device, and sometimes require a reboot, before it will show the second monitor in the Display properties.

Also, be aware, that XFire and SLI modes (ATI / NVidia) don't actually support dual monitors. They use all the combined processing power for one only.

If a second monitor isn't detected, the video driver usually doesn't allocate any resources to it. Primarily for power savings and efficiency.

Think about it, a typical, low end, Flat Screen Display of today can display true-color at 1280 x 1024, at 60 hz. That means the video card has to process 5,131,880 bytes every 60th of a second,
or 314,572,800 bytes per second. That's a lot of bandwidth! Why try to drive two such displays if there is only one?

Additional Note: That is also why the very large displays (mostly anything greater than 1920 X 1600 pixels) require both DVI connectors to power a single display. Even DVI runs out of bandwidth over a single channel.

Already in Windows 98 there was support for more than one screen, up to eight if I remember correctly.

Go to you display properties, (right click >> Properties). Goto the settings tab. Under display, use the drop down menu to select the 2nd video output.

Should activate it. Other specific settings depend on the type of video card, and drivers.

Here's the message my adapter software gives me: