Thursday, January 17, 2013

How To Use Multiple Monitors

How does it work

You can display the same picture in all the monitors, but usually multiple monitors are used as extended displays, making the desktop larger. In extended mode, depending on how you position your displays, they act as one big desktop, it means that you move with your mouse from monitor to monitor the same way you normally move with your mouse, just by moving it around.

All the programs and windows act the same way as normally, you can drag them from one display to another or extend the size of your window over by multiple displays at the same time.



Why use multiple monitors

Better multitasking. You can use different programs and activities for each display. No need to ALT+TAB for getting stuff on top of the screen.

Good overview. You see all that's going on simultaneously.

Good for movies and games. Some games support multi display option and you may be able to play the game on more than one monitor.

One downside is that your computer needs more resource. Especially if you want to play games on bigger resolution/multiple monitors.

Connecting the monitors

There are many types of connection slots, VGA is usually used for monitors, but HDMI is becoming more popular as it also transfers audio and has better bandwith and resolution possibilities. The limit for how many monitors you can actually connect is determined by how many output slots you have in your computer.

You may need to force detect the monitors by using the "Detect" button.

The same wallpaper for all

One wallpaper for all the monitors

It's pretty simple actually, let's say you have two monitors side by side ( like this 1|2 ) and you want them to share a wallpaper. Each monitor has a resolution of 1920x1080, that means that you will need a wallpaper that is (2x1920)x1080 in dimension = 3840x1080. There are a lot of them in the internet, just google "wallpapers for multiple monitors".

If you want to use a smaller wallpaper that's made for one monitor, simply apply them to background and set the wallpaper mode to "tiles" so that the wallpaper is used as 2 times, one time for each monitor.

Positioning

You can customize the positioning yourself, simply by dragging the screens to your wanted location. Normally people position the monitors in the settings as they are in real life on the desk.
Some examples:




6 monitor example

My personal "second home" desktop


I use the laptop display as the main screen and on the 23" external monitor I watch movies, write super awesome programs (good for multiple windows such as debug,code,etc.), and so much more.

2 comments:

  1. Awesome stuff! Thanks for the information.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I like that multiple monitor system very much. Especially when i'm doing my school work.

    ReplyDelete