Mish ,
First off , to run 2 monitors you need 2 video cards , or 1 dual head video cards . I used to run Matrox video cards but are expensive for whats available now . I now run the Nvdia Dual head 128mb Card and love em dearly ,cheap and excellent performance .
My setup is 4 flat screens KDS 17 " monitors on a custom spec built workstation , 3.0 Mhz clock speed AMD chip 1.5 Gig Ram
on Win XP . I believe win 2000 does not clear the cache as effectively and is essentially the Win NT platform whereas Win XP Pro has some great features but unless you are running some major performance hogs like Metastock and Visual trader realtime you probably won't notice much difference .
I would go flat screen if you can , they are cheap now and don't flicker , better for the eyes in the long run . Also get more Ram , it does make a huge difference . Once you go Multi screen you'll never go back .
I run a total of 6 screens networked on 2 computers , 2 on 1 system , 4 monitors on the other (my primary).
Anyways , the KDS Flat Screens were inexpensive and are analog , work just great for me . The Video card will handle both digital or analog screens and the card is cheap . Most cards only have 8mb or 24 mb 's but the NVdia card has 128 mb which makes a difference . Also I believe the new card has 256 mb chips on them now .
Bottom line , better to have a video card that performs and as much Ram as the system can handle , I believe the 330 system may only take 512 Mb Ram on the board but if it can take more the Win 2000 will be able to accept and use up to 800 mb.
You can get this done fairly easily but for your next system visit your local computer store , Dell systems are pretty well stuck with what you can do with them , they use some proprietary parts that forces you to only buy their components in some cases and hard to expand the system . These days their service is crap and would not recommend a new system from Dell for anything other than doing kids homework or a paper weight LOL! You can now build a system 3 times more powerful and efficient from your local guy than what the majors can offer . Stay away from boxed systems from Staples and those types of stores if you want performance and be able to expand later. |
