David_I,
>>"I want it (a Windows 2000 Pro system) to be able to drive 6 monitors"<<
Guess you and me have the same "want"... :-)
Originally, I had a Matrox G400 Max (AGP) dual head and 3 Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 PRO (PCI) cards working with Windows 98SE. After migrating to Windows 2000 Pro, I have to give up the 3 Diamond Stealth PCI cards because they were no longer compatible with Windows 2000.
While the Matrox G400 Max still worked with Windows 2000, it came with a drawback. Windows 98SE's OS treated the Matrox G400 dual heads like two separate graphic card with its own independent screen size control. Thus, you can have a 1024 x 768 on one monitor and a 800 x 600 on another.
Unfortunately, Windows 2000's OS treats the Matrox G400 dual heads as one window. Meaning that even though both monitors were lighted up thru the Matrox G400 dual head, you really have one wide window where each monitor show the half of the window. Technically speaking, your screen size has to be set as 2048 x 768 instead of the usual 1024 x 768.
And the frustrating part of this unusual setup is that you're always bombarded with dialog boxes that opened right in the middle of the two monitors! Each monitor shows half of the dialog box. On top of this frustration, if you have two monitors of different size, oh boy... can you see the headache here? Btw, while you should be able to get the screen size 2048 x 768 with Windows 2000; for some reason, my system only give me 1600 x 600. I couldn't even get 2048 x 768!
(I was informed later that my inability to get 2048 x 768 was because I used the BNC cable for both of my NEC monitors. Because of the BNC cable, Windows 2000 couldn't recognize my monitors correctly. I never unplugged my BNC cables and replaced with the normal cables, so I couldn't tell whether it will fix my problem or not. Besides, I was sick of the boxes that showed up in the middle of my two monitors anyway...)
Needless to say, I replaced my Matrox G400 with two Appian Jeronimo Pro cards, one dual and one quad. I bought these two cards from ebay.com and they both worked perfectly. The beauty of using the Appian Jeronimo Pro card is that Windows 2000 already have the Microsoft certified driver for it! Thus, you can imagine the trouble free installation when the plug and play feature of Windows 2000 kicked in and installed the correct driver for it. After that, the Appian Hydravision 98 application software (latest version downloaded from Appian site) works flawlessly. And YES, I can set individual screen size for each of the 6 monitors!
Therefore, from my own personal and positive experience, I favor the Appian card with Windows 2000. I tried to check out your Colorgraphic cards but found little info on it except from their own website. I did a search on CNET and came up with no product review. I went to Microsoft Windows 2000 hardware compatibility test and found no reference to Colorgraphic. But if you type in Appian, you will notice that Microsoft hardware compatibility test comes back with a "check" for Jeronimo Pro and a beautiful message- "The driver for this hardware device is included on the Windows 2000 CD-ROM."
Guess I'm rambling too much already, hope it helps...
:-)
p.s. FWIW, I set up a second harddisk that has Windows 98SE OS and plug it into the 2nd IDE cable. Thus it is a Secondary Master and not a slave. This way, if I want to boot to Windows 98SE for whatever reason, I simply boot to my motherboard CMOS and tell the CMOS to boot first to IDE(1) instead of IDE(0). This way, since I use Windows 2000 95% of the time, I don't have to worry about the dual boot selection screen everytime I turn on the computer (for some reason, I can't stand that screen!).
p.p.s. Just want to thanks those who mentioned about the Drive Image software. Just bought and received my copy today from my mail! |
