There was so much swearing, driver uninstalling and reinstalling, cable switching, and animal sacrifice involved that which thing actually caused it to miraculously start working has been lost in all that.Ĭompare that experience with the experience of multiple monitors under Windows 7. I ran multiple monitors under Windows XP and I couldn’t even tell you how I got it to work. Windows XP made it a little easier but it was still largely a wing and a prayer kind of thing. How much better? Setting up multiple monitors under Windows 98 was possible but driver support was spotty, there wasn’t much demand, and thus nobody really cared about it enough to make it easy.

As a result multi-monitor users enjoy better native OS support, better hardware, and better driver support than they ever have before. More and more people are using multiple monitors and both Microsoft and the monitor/graphics card companies have noticed. If you’ve never installed any add-on cards or even cracked open the case of your PC, now would be a great time to check out the second section of our Building a New Computer Guide to get the basics. Pulling that stunt is highly dependent on the combination of motherboard and graphics card you use as some motherboards will not allow you to use the onboard video if an add-on video card is detected. In my particular case I kept the onboard video GPU that came with the motherboard active and managed to squeeze by with a dual-port video card and the one onboard port. When running 3-4 monitors most people just buy two inexpensive dual-port video cards.

If you want to run dual monitors the most common solution is to buy a video card with dual ports on it-if you’re not trying to play cutting edge games you can score great dual-head video cards for cheap. You’ll need a few things: extra monitors, extra cables (which likely came with the extra monitors you purchased), and enough video ports to go around.

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