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Pastimes : Computer Learning -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ron who wrote (68737)	2/17/2010 4:43:25 PM
From: thecow	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 110655

Thanks for letting us know the solution. I hate to say I saw the same solution while looking for your answer but I have never had dual monitors so I thought I would just leave it for your call. I didn't want to tell you to go buy something when I had no idea if it would work. Glad you got it fixed.

To: Ron who wrote (68737)	2/17/2010 4:45:00 PM
From: Cheeky Kid	Respond to of 110655

Be careful with those DVI to VGA adapters. They are so cheaply made you should have one or two spares on hand if you have to disconnect the computer to clean it outside. When I took my computer in to get a new chipset fan installed, I had a hell of a time getting the dual monitors working, one was green, then it went blue the other was fine, then one stopped working. So I marked the good connector with a pen and bought a pack of 2 new ones. One right out of the package was bad, the other was good. That was a learning experience. They were Startech DVI to VGA adapters.

To: Ron who wrote (68737)	2/23/2010 12:39:39 PM
From: Mike McFarland	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110655

Here's my somewhat harrowing video card adventure from last night: Along with my new HDD (to set up my dual boot) I got a better video card--price was right, $15 after rebate to upgrade from ATI x600 to a 3450. Seems like a good enough card--I got a pcie-x16 card that works with my old PC, it is fanless and I think shouldn't draw too much for the 305w supply in this Dell Dimension. So I remove all the old ATI software and the old drivers, swap the cards, bootup and attempt to install the latest Catalyst drivers. Halfway through the installation I get a blue screen hardware fail, something about memory and parity. Man, I'd have said a few choice words if my kids hadn't been in the room. Well, the system rebooted okay, and a second attempt at installing the drivers seemed to work fine. XP installed the sound drivers for the HDMI port on the card, and after a bewildering 15 minutes of one monitor being blank and then the other as I switched settings around (and one monitor only getting a severely degraded setting at one point) I finally got my two monitors at the correct display and arranged correctly with the primary desktop in front of me. At first it didn't occur to me that my primary monitor would now be #2 (it was #1 with my old card) and that I had to drag it to the correct position in display properties/settings tab. The whole process probably took the better part of an hour, which seems excessive. So far I've only run dxdiag, which suggests the card probably works fine. I was 90% sure I'd have to return the card at first, but a little perseverance seems to have paid off. I can't actually see a difference yet between the old x600 video and this card, but for $15 I had to do it, and getting an HDMI port my prove useful at some point.