Dual Screen Setup Help, Bios Does Not Allow Onboard(VGA) and PCI(DVI) Together.

[Darren Ong]

i have a hp pavilion slimeline s5388d, with a 32 bits windows 7. i recently got my hands on a second monitor, however my bios does not have the option of using 2 graphic card at the same time. it only allows you to choose either onboard or pci in the primary video option. i have updated to the latest bios, but still does not have the option. is the problem with my cpu as its an old system or is there another way to 'force' the bios or system to run 2 cards at the same time?

 

[das_stig]

You would normally run both monitors form the dvi/vga/dp/hdmi connections on the plugin video card and then Windows can be configured to use both.

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

It is normal behaviour for the on-board graphics adapter to be disabled automatically when a PCI graphics card is detected. This happens on all computers and is necessary to avoid a resource conflict between two devices of the same type. There is no way to avoid this happening.

To use two monitors simultaneously you need a PCI graphics card with dual heads so you can plug two monitors in to it.

By "dual heads" I mean a card which has either two VGA ports or two DVI ports (not one of each because they don't support two monitors, they just give you a choice of which type of connection to use for a single monitor depending on which type of port that monitor has).

So basically you need to buy a "dual head" graphics card.

 

[Darren Ong]

alright thanks, my the cards on my cpu are the defaults ones.