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Forums -> Multiple monitors -> Primary and Secondary displays switch at driver change.
Bill Cline   2006-04-30 01:29
My system: Dell XPS600 Media Center, 3MHz, 2GB RAM, nVidia 6800 video graphics card.

Primary display is a Dell 2005FPW LCD monitor and secondary display an old Sony analog 17" monitor.

The Dell 2005FPW is connected to the 6800 graphics card via DVI and the Sony analog via the serial port on the 6800 card.

Problem:

When I upgrade drivers for the primary Dell 2005FPW all hell breaks loose and the two displays are switched. My 2005FPW is changed to the secondary display and the Sony analog becomes primary. It takes an extraordinary amount of time and trouble to simply make the Dell 2005 my primary display, although it still shows up as #2 when I ask for identity in Display Properties.

I turn off the Sony at bootup but still my desired primary, the Dell 2005, is identified as #2. If I make the wrong move with trying to rectify the situation, then I often lose my desktop on the Dell monitor and must turn on the Sony so I can get back to #1 display.

If this has happened to others I would appreciate directions to fix it.

Thank you,

Bill
Josh   2006-04-30 18:11
I've seen this sort of thing happen before. Ultimately I never really found a good work around for it. I just stopped dealing with it at the software level since it seems to happen each time I updated the drivers on one of my older cards.

My solution in the end was to simply invert the physical plugs for the monitors. It takes about 5 seconds to swap and it really doesn't have any downside besides from the nagging feeling that it shouldn't be needed.
Bill Cline   2006-05-01 00:31
Thanks, Josh.

I can't switch over the connections from monitors to the 6800 video card. My LCD monitor uses a DVI plug and the analog uses the old serial plug.

However, I was able to fix things by unplugging the analog monitor from the video card, re-booted and once again my LCD monitor was primary.

Shutting down again and re-plugging the analog monitor in to the serial port on the card then re-booting once again identified the LCD monitor as #1 and the analog as #2, so, until I again try to upgrade video drivers, I'm OK.

I would think Realtimesoft would address this kind of problem.

Bill
WishMaster2020   2006-05-19 19:47
I'm in the same boat and use the same solution, it's not a realtimesoft thing either, it's just the way the computer assigns primary monitors. I've dealt with it long before i knew ultramon existed.
chwanng   2006-06-13 01:16
I wonder if there is other technique to deal with this since my app uses 8 monitors (2 quadro cards)?
Whenever there is (for example) a power failure at one of the monitors during reboot, XP will (seems to be) automatically detach the monitor, and "re-arrange" all the monitors.
This has cost lots of manual work to re-connect all the monitors.

Chwan Keng Ng
Forums -> Multiple monitors -> Primary and Secondary displays switch at driver change.

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