Rearranging Furniture

by Charles Miller on October 6, 2001

I rearranged my room today, moving some stuff around so that I could move my computers back to the big table. The little desk was getting too cramped, and it was impossible to do any serious work there because everything was at a weird angle, and there was no place to balance books. My new geek-zone can be seen here.

Dual-head is cool, but annoyingly implemented. Win2K (or perhaps the Matrox drivers, I'm not sure) does not treat the two screens as separate, but just spreads everything out so that I have a screen resolution of 2560x1024. This is neat in theory, but in practice it means that when you maximise a window it takes up both windows, the systray in the taskbar appears on the secondary screen, and all sorts of transient windows (such as alt-tab) appear in the "middle" of the screen, unreadably split between the two monitors. I'd much rather have both monitors be a "desktop" in their own right.

I also discovered that my 17" monitor (the second one) is stuffed. Even if I shrink the horizontal stretch to the narrowest possible setting, the picture is too big for the screen. This is regardless of what computer it's plugged into or what resolution I've chosen. Not happy.

(Update) I downloaded more recent drivers for the dual-head. They work properly. Now all I have to do is get the damn second monitor fixed.

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