Why Can't Windows Do Windows?

By David Em

November 22, 2005

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Earlier this year, we built a Windows XP workstation to test the most demanding multimedia software we could throw at it, including digital photography, audio, video, and 3D animation apps (see http://www.byte.com/documents/s=9503/byt1116867657638/0523_em.html to read about it). We christened it Atlas.

Atlas is powered by dual AMD Opteron 252 processors. It's got 8 gigabytes of Kingston RAM, 15K SCSI Seagate drives, and Nvidia Quadro 4400 and 540 PCI-e graphics cards. For the most part, Atlas has performed flawlessly--until a couple weeks ago when I plugged three new displays into it.

Three Heads are Better Than OneMultimedia apps require considerable desktop real estate. Most users get by with their design windows, timelines, and a plethora of tool palettes jammed onto a single monitor. It can get claustrophobic. Some manage considerably better by using two displays. We recommend getting all the visual elbow room you need by putting three, or even four screens at your disposal.

Together, Atlas's Quadro 4400 and 540 boards can drive three screens (there are two DVI outputs on the 4400, and one DVI or VGA out on the 540). Hewlett-Packard had just sent two new LCD panels our way, their $329 1280x1024 19-inch L1906 and their $700 21-inch 1680x1040 f2105 (I'll be discussing both screens in detail in an upcoming column).

I plugged the L1906 and the f2105 into the Quadro 4400, and our venerable old Eizo Nanao F980 tube, set to 1600 x 1200, into the Quadro 540. The L1906 was on the left, the f2105 in the middle, and F980 on the right. Then my troubles began.

Trouble Ahead

Past experience with multiple displays had shown that Windows treats its primary surface (labeled Number 1 in the Display/Settings Panel) better when it comes to rendering video overlays, so I wanted the f2105, with its wide-aspect ratio, to be the "hero" monitor.

Unfortunately Windows had, in its wisdom, decided to label the f2105 as monitor Number 3, and the L1906 as Number 1.

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