Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Multiple Display question

You didn’t say exactly what troubles some games are having. If they just fail and exit to the desktop about all I can suggest is besides updating the drivers as you already have also make sure you have the latest patches for the games.

If the only issue is having your “desktop on the monitor and your game playing on the TV then there is no real good solution only work-arounds.

Most applications are not mutli-monitor aware and will insist on starting on whichever monitor you designated as primary which is also where your desktop icons and taskbar default. What I did is to designate my TV as the primary and then drag all the desktop icons and the taskbar to the smaller LCD monitor. The first time you start any program after setting up multiple monitors the program will default to starting on the (primary) TV in my case. You can then drag it to the secondary to use it. If you exit a program that is multi-monitor aware (most operating system stuff is) it will restart on whichever monitor you closed it on. Most applications like games will always start on the primary if started in full screen mode.

The work-around for games is to either start the game in windowed mode if it’s available. Some games allow you to select this from a menu, others require you to edit a resource or startup file and some just won’t allow it or don’t function properly in windowed mode. Search the internet for instructions on how to use window mode on a given game.

I use the other gaming work-around which is to start the game in full screen mode so it pops up on the primary monitor normally. The problem here is that this usually locks the cursor into the game and won’t let you move it to the other monitor while the game has focus (the application that the mouse and keyboard are currently tied to). To get out of the game and back your desktop use ALT+TAB to move the focus out of the game to the desktop or another open application. This should cause the game to minimize to the taskbar and allow you to use the mouse and keyboard normally. When you want to go back to the game just hold ALT down and keep pushing the TAB until the game pops back up in the primary monitor.

Hope this helps. I’m tired so if it’s not clear I’ll try to clarify it later or maybe someone else with a better solution will chime in.

P.S. I set up the dual monitors using the Windows: Properties > Settings box and don’t mess with the nVidia stuff.


Edit: One more work-around. Use Linux and a Windows emulator. Most popular Linux GUIs allow you to CTL+TAB between virtual desktops avoiding the whole dual monitor issue completely. I use to do that but haven’t got around to putting Linux on my HTPC yet.

Dean