A tale of two monitors.
VolteFace said:
Perhaps there is some sort of video driver fix you can get or something. I have dual monitors and only the left one is used in fullscreen mode.
NVidia gives me the runaround. Because I bought it through Dell, its their problem. Dell gives me the runaround because its only guaranteed to work on XP and Im running windows 2000 professional. Besides they have no in depth knowledge of NVidia and what would cause/not cause that sort of problem.
When I got my computer, I had XP Home on it. I never used the 2x monitor because it worked awfully. because one is a widescreen and the other is a regular screen, it would cause the fullscreen to be larger than the display, causing it to scroll down and right about an inch. Also because it carried over the taskbar, the time and bar would constantly be gone and I hated having the screen scroll and jerk around as I navigated.
So I thought 2 monitors was stupid.
Then I found my old Windows 2000 Pro disc and put that on my computer. It was okay, but my trackpad and one set of mice buttons on the laptop didnt work with it. Again, no dell support as it was windows 2000.
I threw XP Home back on because I wasnt going to do any ASP.Net apps anytime soon. It was like magic. both screens were perfect. It seperated everything perfectly. Fullscreen would always take fullscreen on the computer monitor. It was kinda annoying that whenever I would run a DVD/video, the external monitor would automatically be pirated into a fullscreen mode. Made it annoying trying to watch a movie and try to do something. But the taskbar and clock were kept to the laptop screen. That was nice.
But alas, things come to an end. I thought I was going to start learning ASP.Net apps again, my XP Home got seriously wigged by spyware and spyapps. I decided to reinstall using 2000 pro because I had a cd with service pack 4 on it. That would save so much time vs downloading, installing and restarting 20 times with XP.
I got ALL of the up to date bios and driverupdates, everything. Now something doesnt feel "solid" about my installation and thats saying something since Windows 2000 Pro was my favorite OS. I used to be able to keep it up and running for weeks without a reboot. But this time its... tainted. It requires reboots, memory leaks abound. I see the IIS services hogging memory. Even worse, my second monitor is all wiggy.
THIS time, it decides that the only matching resolution is to magically cut an inch off the top and bottom of the monitor. So its like having a 17" monitor with a 14" viewable area. It tries to keep up with the laptop monitor instead of being its own monitor and makes text tinier and hard to read... kinda defeating the purpose of having an extra monitor for documentation.
I noticed that my configuration under Properties->Settings->Monitor (that controls resolution) is severely limited. NVidia software is providing 100% of the support. My taskbar is spanning both screens.
As I search the internet, I only see props for XP being native in handling multiple monitors and being truely top notch.
I also just found Cirri and some other utility that lets you develop ASP.Net on XP home. Im starting to back things up on my external harddrive for my move back to XP Home. Maybe thatll fix my problems to a degree.
As a note, the only fullscreen gaming fix I have is to activate both monitors, make the external one the primary monitor - then turn off the monitor sharing. It gives me a normal sized monitor for fullscreen apps. But if I keep both monitors on, it really distorts the resolution on my laptop and things look wider and squater.
So Ill probobly be making a move back to XP home...
I also have a beta (or is it alpha?) of Longhorn. Is that even worth me asking?
)... games are made to be immersive. 
