As I said before, I was considering getting a second 2005fpw LCD to go dual head on my new rig. I was looking forward to browsing the web while doing full screen stuff. My desk was arranged in a 90 degree fashion so surfing on my laptop wasn’t really working. Dual head would be so much faster because I could just move my mouse over.

Dell had this great deal going and I got the 2005fpw for $525 with tax and shipping. Amazing.

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It came in and I hooked it up to my PC to run dual head. It turned out that the new monitor didn’t have the LCD backlight bleeding going on like my first one so I swapped them around so the new one is my primary.

XP booted up, the BIOS screen, boot list and all were mirrored until XP started. Nvidia includes lots of spanning options that I didn’t see before when you have dual head going. Like, you can horizontally span (taskbar spans across both monitors) or you can just have windows extend the desktop. It was a neat setup but I kept wanting to center the two monitors directly in front of me in a V shape. I wasn’t feeling it and I rearranged the whole dealy.

The main reason I scrapped the dual head is the whole point of browsing while gaming. When I was playing World of Warcraft full screen on Screen #1 and had Firefox on Screen #2, clicking on #2 would minimize WoW whereas with Synergy it can detect a mouseover and not lose focus. It’s not a total loss as the 2005fpw gives me more desktop space than the built in 17″ screen but it’s kinda poopy. That is, until the Intel Macs come out and then I can have 3 screens like I wanted. :P Someone stop me.

So in the end, I closed my mac’s lid so that the 2nd screen is the primary and I set up synergy to run on bootup. So I can control my mac with one keyboard and mouse. It’s much better to have two compys I think.

Last night I watched Total Recall on screen2, with transparent terminal monitoring CS server in case anyone started playing while I was playing WoW, surfing etc. It was so awesome.

I was hoping to get a triple screen thing going but the laptop’s screen is set back a bit too much and I couldn’t make it work on my desk.

It was however, very awesome to get full screen Playstation2 on Screen2 and a game guide on Screen1 for example. Playing GT4 with the wheel off center might be weird however (I’m not whining).

Displays are fun as crap.