Windows display spanning sucks
There, I’ve said it. I’ve tried repeatedly to make this work the way I think it should work and have repeatedly gotten bizarre application behavior. I have a notebook with a small 12” display at work—mostly for its light weight—and a 20” LCD monitor. The notebook LCD is 1024×768, and the large display is 1600×1200. You would think that this wouldn’t be hard, but this is how I have them laid out in Windows:
Instead, it reports the maximal dimensions to applications, or at least seems to, as a lot of applications seem to place their windows in positions that are impossible to grab. To add insult to injury, it also forgets which monitor is on which side, what their positions relative to each other are, and refuses to let me make the large monitor my “default” desktop.
NB: This is not hard, and Apple has done it correctly since the early 90s at the latest. I had 2 24-bit cards in a Mac IIfx long ago and never had an issue.
This entry was posted at 4:45 pm on 22 November 2005 and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post-specific RSS 2.0 feed.
I believe that a lot of how it works, or doesn’t, is driver related, not specifically Microsoft code. Where-as Apple controls everything and can make sure that it all works correctly, I think Microsoft depends on vendors to do it “right”. From what I’ve heard some people have it work perfectly, and some not at all, and the unifying theme is whose gear they are using.
I must say Apple’s single menubar is suboptimal on multi-display systems.
I have two 1600×1024 screens on my G4, arranged side-by-side. I get annoyed when I’m working in an app on one screen, but the menubar is on the other screen. Your neck gets tired from looking back and forth all the time. And it’s kinda tiresome mousing across 3200 pixels all the time, acceleration or no.
I rather wish they either put a menubar on each screen, for whatever apps are active on that screen. Or they could bring back the NeXT menus as an option, which floated and could be arranged on a per-app basis. (And the menu could be brought up at the mouse pointer by right-clicking. Maybe Apple could make a key combination or mouse click which would temporarily bring the menubar up on the screen where the mouse pointer is.)
This doesn’t seem to be as big of a problem on Windows, because Windows puts the menus in the windows.
(Also, it’d be nice if the Dock worked better with multiple screens.)
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
I have been using multiple monitors with windows since Windows NT, and with the right drivers etc it has worked pretty well for me. The only problem i have consistently run into is with apps that insist on maximizing at start up.
Of course my experience may be partially due to very rarely using any app maximized.