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Jonathan Gaynor 2000-07-07 01:53
Browsing ebay for more monitors to augment my already butch 4-mon 98 box, I keep finding fixed-freuency 20" and 21" monitors for less than 100 bucks. The fact that I would have to drop my GeForce or a TNT for a crappy ff card has always turned me off from buying one of these until last week when I started reading up on multisync monitors.
A great resource on this topic can be found at
http://www.repairfaq.org/sam/ffmon.htm
Apparently singlemon systems cant use a ff monitor on a normal card because of the fact that Windows uses muliple resolutions to boot and then defaults to like 640x480 or something crappy like that while a high-end ff monitor will usually only sync to something in the neighborhood of 1280x1024. To get around this problem the author offers the following advice:
"If all you run is Windows - never any DOS games or other applications that require you to suspend to a full screen DOS shell or run in native DOS mode - then you can always use a second VGA monitor for booting and then just switch over to the high resolution monitor once Windows comes up. Or, just assume your system **will** come up and forgo a display until the Windows desktop appears."
I know people who have done this and it works fine with a switch box or just manual switching of vga cables. They boot into win32, set the correct res. for their ff monitor and then switch. WE, on the other hand, wouldnt have to do that as long as the ff mon isnt our primary.
Say you have a working multimon system. If you attach a fixed-freq mon as secondary running off a normal card and boot into windows the primary will still come up regardless of the resolution on the secondary. From there you can set the correct resolution for the secondary and *bang* - the ff should fire up without a hitch from their on out. Granted you'll never see that warm and fuzzy "windows has successfully init . .." anymore but hey for a cheap 21" I can deal.
This is all theory of course. Im gonna go out this weekend and follow up with another post if it works - wish me luck.
Jonathan Gaynor, Phi Kappa Tau -EK- Rutgers
Network Engineer, MCI Worldcom
Network Technician, RUNET 2000 Dorm Networking
http://www.eden.rutgers.edu/~foot
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Braindead 2000-07-08 08:07
Let us know if it really works... you got me very interested as i've seen some >100$ ff monitors from sgi & co.
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Jonathan Gaynor 2000-07-09 11:32
I will - I just bought a 19.4" viewable (large 20") off of ebay for 30 BUCKS plus shipping. Its a rasterops - which is apparently the hardest kind of monitor to get working with a normal card. It should arrive in a week or two - Ill post as soon as I get word.
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Rob 2001-06-22 09:49
Did you ever get it working? It has been a year since you last stated something about it.
Thanks,
Rob Noe
GraphicComputers
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