I'm trying to run dual monitors off of two seperate video cards. The primary card is a GeForce 4 MX420 and the secondary that i'm trying to add is an old S3 Trio64 PCI card. Anyway, my question is, how in the holy hell do i make this work? When i put the card in my computer and turn it on, windows will start, but in the device manager for the Trio64 it says... "This device cannot start because it has a problem.". I know that the card is working because I pulled it out of a fully functional machine when i upgraded the card in it. If i manually disable, then re-enable the device, windows bluescreens and my computer restarts. Any help would be appreciated.

In the BIOS set it so that PCI video cards are initialized first.

tried that. computer does "BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP.... BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP.................BEEP" then starts without video.

does the pci work outside of a dual computer, the card itself might not work, and would cause these problems, bc the making it boot first should have fixed the problem bc then it is forced to intalise

the beep beeping is prolly the bios telling you that there is a video problem

gee thanks guru. thats so...enlightening

[ image of Ellen Feiss ]




/sorry

Edit: Removed image

I'm not sure why it wouldn't work. I'm using an almost identical setup, with an s3 trio64 and a Geforce 4 Ti 4600. Setting the primary video adapter to PCI did the trick for me. If you tried that and it doesn't work, your best bet is to buy a newer PCI card.

i pulled the card from a working machine when i upgraded the card. it still worked when i pulled it.

Try your current machine, with only the PCI Video Adapter. See if your hardware it-self is having the problem. The newer hardware in your computer may be to blame, not the vid. card. That will also let you see that your drivers are installed properly.

i already figured out that my spare card is a piece of shit. it doesn't work like it should anymore. spudgunr has an old one that he's willing to get rid of, and maybe i can ask him how to set it up. Thanks for all of your help!

I'm here for you and anyone else who wants help with the awesomeness of multiple monitors. Just let me know. spudgunr knows how to get in touch with me worst case senario.

hive im glad im so enlightening

yea it was kinda an obviouse statement wasnt it. lol sorry i was kinda tired

what i ment was that the video card most likely doesnt work because of bios's video error. its well i dunno and it really doesnt matter ne more

at any rate, consider this thread closed... I got it working finally. i went to spudgunr's house and bought one of his old PCI cards, so now i have one big 2048x768 desktop that i can do lots of stuff with. thanks for all of your help, and thanks to spudgunr for having the part i needed.

yeah, im about to join the crowd of multiple monitors. the hard part was just finding an identical monitor of the one i already have. apparently they discontinued my model. got lucky and found someone on ebay selling the same one i have.

now how will this turn out? i get a dvi to vga adapter and hook the new monitor up to that. then use the ultramon prog to run the duals. now, will there actually be a primary and secondary monitor so only one can actually play video? also, will there be an interference problem if i run the 2048x1024 res at a low refresh rate? they're running from the same card so i wouldnt think there would be a prob.

mine aren't identical. They might cause interference running low refresh, so i would set your screen res back to 1024x768 on both monitors and crank up the refresh. That's what i did, and now neither monitor interfere's with the other. oh and yes, there will be a primary / secondary, so only the primary will get the full-screen stuff. windows media player will FS to either one, though, so you don't have to worry about that.