You may be a video editor, a gamer, or simply someone who wants to take advantage of more display real estate. You may have seen someone who has two monitors hooked up and wondered how that works. Well, wonder no more. We're going to teach you how to set it up yourself. There's a few requirements that you're going to need to do something like this. For starters, you're going to have to have two monitors. If you don't have two monitors, it's a moot point. You also have to have a video card that is capable of supporting two monitors.
Now, there's two different types of connectors that you can have. You can have a DVI connector, which is going to look like a white rectangle, or you can have a VGA connector, which generally has some pins in it, about 15 of them, and they tend to be blue. Many times, when you are connecting a monitor, you're going to realize the monitor you have doesn't fit your video card, especially when you're in transition periods, as we are now, going from analog to digital or from VGA to DVI.
Many companies are making DVI to VGA adapters now that allow you to take an analog connection, or VGA, and convert it to DVI, so you can take that monitor that you want to be running on your video card, but the ports don't match up. Once you have the adapter plugged onto the cable, you're going to find the open port in the back of your system and line the adapter up with the open port. You need to make sure that they're aligned accordingly.
The bottom of the DVI port is flat. So I'm taking the flat portion with the sharp corners, as opposed to the rounded corners, and I'm lining them up. Once I've pushed that in, just like I did when I was putting the adapter on, I'm going to tighten the thumb screws. Once this is done, we're going to go into Windows and set it up there. So now all the cords and ports are connected and ready to go.
Before we turn on the monitors and add the second display to the desktop, you may be questioning whether your PC is designed to have two monitors plugged into it. It may vary with different PC manufacturers. But the rule of thumb is, if you see two ports on your system, it will support two monitors. In order to have the monitors show up correctly, I'm going to, one, make sure that the monitor is on for the second monitor.
I'm then going to go to my desktop, and I'm going to right click and choose Properties. The Display Properties menu will pop up, and I'm going to then choose the Settings tab at the top of that window. Once you're there you'll see two black boxes. One is highlighted with the black box, and that's your current monitor. And one is probably going to be to the right side of it.
Go ahead and click that box. And you'll see check boxes underneath the screen resolution slider that have opened up. One says Extend my Windows desktop onto this monitor. Put a checkmark into that box, hit Apply, and click Okay. Once this is done, you're now ready to go, and I'm free to move icons from one monitor to the other. For more information on displays and display connections, visit this link.
