I recently installed Windows Vista Ultimate on my new machine, and although both of my monitors were detected, only one was working.
Even with fresh nvidia drivers, my right-hand monitor displayed as a grayed-out box. So while Vista clearly saw the monitor, it wasn’t going to do anything with it. Rather than consult official documentation, I headed straight to the most reliable source of technical information: random fanboy forums.
Lesson learned: Do not hit your back button if the first reply is some worthless Tier 1 tech support answer. There’s gold below the ‘fold.’
For instance, I almost gave up entirely on a thread because this answer appeared earlier in the discussion:
Does your 8800GT card have 2 DVI connectors and is each one connected with a
separate cable to each of the 2 displays?
I knew it was something simple! After following these steps I bet the author of the original question found out what his problem was. His 8800GT probably didn’t have two DVI connectors, or probably he found out he only had one monitor, or he was somehow running two connectors to one DVI port on a single screen. That kind of genius will save you a lot of time troubleshooting.
Anyway, a few more scrolls of my mouse wheel and I found the answer which solved my problem. It does seem to be most people mention “Vista Ultimate” when they’re experiencing this problem. I never had this problem with my machine running Vista Premium, so maybe there’s just some other “value-added” feature in Premium which causes this dumbfuckery.
Thanks to random poster “Harm7″ on vistax64.com for straightening this mess out. I’ve bullet-ized his answer:
- Power on all your displays
- Right-click on your desktop, select “Personalize”
- Click on “Display Settings”
- Right-click the box representing your “unattached” monitor. (That’s the gray one)
- Select “Attach” from the menu that popped up
- Click “Apply” after your monitor brightens up
- Repeat for as many monitors as you need to “attach”
I’d ask why I’d need to “attach” a monitor that’s clearly hooked up to the machine, but I don’t want my head to hurt anymore.
