Answer:
There’s already a video card sitting in your PC’s AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) or PCI-E (PCI Express) slot that’s connected to your main monitor. To make arrangements for additional monitors, you’ll need to either replace your current video card with a model that provides two (or more) video ports (connecting a monitor to each port), or install a secondary video card in an empty PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) slot and simply add a monitor to that new video port.
After Windows XP recognizes and installs drivers for the new video hardware, you can enable and configure the new monitor(s) by right-clicking your Desktop, selecting Properties, and clicking the Settings tab. Each monitor will appear as a numbered icon on the tab. You can select each icon and choose the appropriate resolution and color depth for each display. Remember to click Apply and OK to save any changes.
Extended, span, and clone modes are the three most common multimonitor modes. In extended mode your Windows Desktop is simply extended to additional monitors. To enable this just select the icon for your second monitor and select the Extend My Windows Desktop Onto This Monitor checkbox.
The span mode forces all of the monitors attached to the same video card to act as a single monitor, effectively creating one big monitor; because of this, all the spanned monitors must share the same resolution and color depth. If you use a video card with two or more video ports, you can clone one monitor to another and use the clone mode. This is particularly handy in instructional situations when you want someone else at another location to watch what you’re doing.
It’s important to remember that secondary video adapters installed in older PCI card slots won’t offer superior video performance. Some applications that require rendering, and other sophisticated graphical functions will probably run better on the monitor attached to your main AGP or PCI-E graphics card. |