How to Have Two Screens on Your Computer

Video Transcript

"With computer displays getting cheaper, something you might want to do is add two monitors to you computer. Hi. I'm Charles Stewart, Jr., and I'm going to talk to you about adding another monitor to your computer setup. Right now, I've got it set up for a single monitor and, what you want to do in most cases, you want to first check your graphics card for your computer. You can do this by going to your manufacturer's website, if you have a Dell or an HP or something like that, you can go to their website and look up the support and get the user manual. Or, if you have a user manual, you can look through it and it should tell you what kind of graphics card your computer has. A lot of the lower end desktop computers have integrated graphics cards. What that means is the graphics card's actually integrated to the motherboard so you might not have that option. It's probably, you know, it's just mostly for work applications. like you're not really out there for gaming you're more using it for an office environment so you may not have the option for two displays unless you go buy a video card. If you have expansion ability or you can find a PCI video card that will help you expand your desktop. So, first you want to do is check your graphics card and go look on the back and usually you'll have like a VGA or DVI and as you look at it, you should see an extra port there and then when you have the extra port, is when you can add the extra monitor. So, you'll reach up there, get your monitor cable and then plug it into the port. Now, once that's installed, you have both of your monitors hooked up, you need to come over here and let Windows know that you have two monitors set up on your computer. I'm running a video graphics card in mine. ATI is usually another popular brand. Most of them, when you have them, have some kind of user set up. So, you can right click on the screen, go down to properties and then go to settings and then, right here is usually how you control your resolution, there should be an advanced tab. When you click the advanced tab, I've got a thing with my graphics card saying start the video control panel. Now that that's started up, I have an icon located down here in my task bar where I can access the settings to my graphics card. So I'm going to click on it and I'm going to go to the end view display settings. And as you can see, it 's offering me single display, clone, which basically you'd have two monitors and it would mimic everything you did on the other monitor. That's good if you're, you know, trying to do presentations and you have and you bought a big monitor to, you know, on a boardroom table and you're working from, you know, your laptop or, you know, your computer desktop and you want people to see what you're doing. The most popular setup would be to do a horizontal span and then you would choose one or the other and then basically that's saying where you want this to be. So, if you hooked one up, you don't have to actually physically move the monitors around, you can just tell it which monitor you want to be kind of on the left and the right. So, I'm going to set that up and then it's going to ask me to "keep these," and I'm going to say "yes." And now, as you can see, it's set up so I've got all this to work with. I've got both my monitors set up and as I drag my cursor, it acts like both these monitors are linked together. And I've successfully linked up two displays to my computer. Again, this is just for my personal setup; yours might be slightly different. You can look at your user manual and, if you do have a graphics card, you should be able to access the same settings that I have. So, that's it for how to hook up two monitors to a computer."