As is now well documented, I now have a dual monitor setup. Multi-monitor setups have been available since windows 98, and yet things still screw it up. But I somehow think they weren’t as prevalent, I mean, now even I have it, and I rarely do any upgrading unless it’s particularly easy or just can’t be helped anymore. And so here we have it.

Need… bigger…. desk….

But programs have to make sure they don’t screw it up. Raymond Chen in his book The Old New Thing calls this a kind of tax. There are lots of taxes that have to be paid by software that wants to play well. Like handling low battery conditions, games working with Alt-Tab, and working properly with multi-monitor setups.

I’ve discovered at least a couple of things that seem to mess up on that front.

PowerDVD, that came pre-installed on my computer, has worked for me relatively faithfully for years. However, when I try to run it on the secondary monitor, it just crashes, right out. And it’s not even using hardware overlays.

WMP seems to work okay (I should hope they pay their own taxes) but once you start playing in one monitor, you can’t drag it to the next one. It is using hardware acceleration, so I presume this is just a limitation, not terribly painful, whatever.

VLC is my new DVD playing software since it doesn’t crash. Well, it does, sometimes. It will just blank out and then die, but what is far more irritating right now is what happens when I play a file in it and have it on the second monitor. When it’s done, the gui shrinks back down to nothing, but then nestles up against the top-left of the screen (still secondary monitor). I can drag another file to it and it plays there, I can drag the window away, but when I double click the titlebar to maximize the window, it acts like a Restore, and just gets a little bigger, I have to doubleclick again to get it to maximize.

But why maximize it, why not just run it fullscreen? Well, that works, but it also creates another entry in the taskbar for VLC hardware overlay. Now if I accidentally touch the original VLC task in the bar, it will appear as an empty gray VLC window overtop of the video. I minimize it, phew.. but then if I doubleclick the fullscreen video to get it back into a window, it does, but the video is now black, and I have to stop it and start it again. I think it’s because when I minimize the parent window, it moves back to the primary display (or thinks it does anyway) and then we get back to trying to move a hardware accelerated playback between monitors. Oh well.

Another sub-tax that VLC violates is keeping dialogs close to the parent. If I put VLC on the secondary monitor and then File – Open Disc, the dialog pops up on the primary monitor… ugh.

I tried Doom3 with the new card, it seemed to be okay (but managed to crash Nvidia’s own Temperature Guage control panel applet afterwards), but since it takes over the primary monitor and drops the res, and the desktop spans, then a bunch of windows suddenly get flung to the secondary monitor. When the game ends, not all of them make it back.

I’ll explore further to see what other programs can’t cope.