Windows 7 Taskforce

Fully support multiple monitors, as a parallel to the new "StreamSwitch" feature

Submitted by hpmoon on November 4, 2008 to Legacy, Usability

Problem: Currently, Windows Vista barely supports multiple monitors. By multiple monitors, I mean (at its simplest) using the usually-standard dual outputs on a video card, so that there is a primary monitor and a secondary monitor. In more complicated systems (yet increasingly conventional), there are two video cards installed in a PC, with two outputs each for a total of four connected monitors.

Windows currently remains bogged down with this primary/secondary approach, which becomes an outdated concept especially when there are four or more connected monitors (only one monitor can be primary, and all the rest are "secondary"). The history of this limitation has much to do with performance limitations, where only one video card slot could run at "full speed," and within each video card, it was assumed that the "primary" output would shoulder the heartiest rendering. This legacy situation is obsolete with low-cost video cards, multiple PCIe 16x slots, etc.

Solution: Currently there is only one software solution that addresses this problem, very clumsily. It's called UltraMon. As a severe compromise, it flips between the primary and secondary status of all connected monitors based on which shortcut you launch. During this switch between primary and secondary status, the icons get all messed up as they flip between monitors, and there is a significant delay. Usually the process also involves having to blank out the other connected monitors in order to force an application to load on the target monitor (giving it no choice) -- this is particularly true of Vista Media Center.

The solution is simply to build into Windows 7 an application shortcut-specific setting that identifies onto which monitor the application will load, dispensing of (indeed, outdating) the primary/secondary situation.

Severity: High

Impact: High

Status: Not fixed