Managing 3 displays

[DarrenSV650S]

Does anyone have a program to easily switch between having 1, 2 and 3 displays? Windows is just making a complete mess of it. It keeps swapping their layout and making programs open in the secondary display.

Ideally I want hotkeys that I can assign to my keyboard to turn on each of the extended displays separately, and also to change the default sound device when I activate one display.

Depends on your GPU. Nvidia have their own program that manages multiple monitors very well. As for hot key switching I think you'd be looking at 3rd party softwar,e I can't think of anything that does that.


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[DarrenSV650S]

It's a Sapphire HD 7950 3gb. I've also got a 1gb sapphire installed just now too because windows wouldn't let me have 3 displays active at the same time, which I don't understand.

I've done it many times with an nvidia card. On both windows 7 and xp.


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[Nutsinatin]

DisplayFusion is a program that I found works better than the Windows or Nvidia programs for two screens, not tried it with three. Torrents are available if you are that way inclined.

For switching audio try an application called auto hotkey along with something like this:
http://www.autohotkey.com/board/topi...-in-windows-7/

[DarrenSV650S]

I just bought display fusion. It's only £14. It is very powerful! I've now got a keyboard shortcut for each possible monitor configuration, and I've also got a key that instantly swaps the sound from my pc speakers to my tv. Perfect!

I've also now got separate taskbars on each monitor, and I can choose which programs open where.

You can have the displays in different machines and control them all from one keyboard/mouse set with:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/synergy

Mind if I ask why you'd want to selectively enable / disable the secondary monitors?

NVidia and AMD both offer native multiple monitor support, NVidia's latest cards support 4 GPUs natively, AMD's 3 GPUs on a standard card and 6 on an Eyefinity edition.

Then you've AMD's Surround which emulates one massive display, merging your three original displays into one. This isn't necessary for using multiple displays but allows games to fullscreen across all monitors.

I ask because in a situation in which you'd maybe need to turn off displays on a frequent basis, wouldn't the Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Display\Screen Resolution utility suffice? Select a display, under the 'Multiple displays' drop down menu, select 'Disconnect' instead of 'Extend'.

[DarrenSV650S]

I switch them off and on a lot and going in to the displays settings every time gets a bit tedious. Plus AMD just wasn't managing them properly and kept messing things up such as the layout of them and my desktop icons.

I watch sky go, Netflix etc via my PC on to my TV. But then when I want to play a game I want to switch to a single display to maximise fps and bring the audio back to my PC speakers.