Monday, July 25, 2005

Start Menu and Multiple Monitors

When you enable multiple monitor on Windows XP, which I did by installing an ATI Radeon card in addition to my existing Nvidia card I found that after changing some of the settings (like which is the primary display), the Start Menu and Task Bar appears on the secondard display. What seemed to happen was the Start Menu etc. moved to one of the display's managed by the ATI card and then I set the primary display back to the Nvidia card it became the primary display (programs and dialog boxes opened on that display) but the Task Bar did not move back.

Eventually, after much reconfiguration and reseting/rebooting I decided to see if I could drag the Task Bar across. Now this is not supposed to work (maybe it has been added in SP2 for XP). So I unlocked the Task Bar and dragged it first to the side of the current screen (the displays are lined up left to right) and then across to the other display - you cannot drag it straight across the bottom of the displays.

This worked a treat, so I relocked the Task Bar and all works now.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

I had the exact same problem and I found your post......Ingeniously simple. I thought I had to configure drivers, etc. Thanks a million for your post.

Saphiroko said...

Wow, I feel like an idiot. I didn't even think of that. Thank a billion for the post! (Google does wonders.)

Anonymous said...

thanks for the tip.

wonder why i didn't think of it....

:)

Семен said...

With Actual Window Manager you can have taskbar and Start button on both monitors.

Anonymous said...

tnx

Unknown said...

WOW LOL So simple thank you for the Knowledge. Was thinking that it could be that easy. :)

Anonymous said...

Thank You! This solved my problem that I have been having for several months.

Anonymous said...

Awesome! I had just sent this question to my IT department! Thanks a bunch.

Patrick said...

Haha! So simple! Thanks you just saved days of pondering

The Swipefile said...

Appreciate you bllogging this