Vista - Dual Monitor Setup Not Working in Vista 64

Anyways, I had a dual-monitor setup on my machine with XP and it worked flawlessly. But with Vista 64-bit, I cant get it to work.

I am running an nVidia GeForce 7900 GT/GTO graphics card and I downloaded the nVidia 64 bit drivers (that were released a month or so ago). The drivers for the card are totaly up to date from the manufacturer.

My primary monitor (HP w2007 Widescreen) works fine when plugged in. But as soon as I try to extend my desktop to a sony SPD-S205F/G monitor, the display on the Sony monitor is fine, but the display on the HP monitor goes gets totally scrambled. I was able to get it configured by swapping primary/secondary configuration of the monitors, i.e. changing the DVI inputs, and it worked very briefly. But then, if you brought up VLC, the screen snowed up again.

The one thing I've noticed is that if I use the nVida control panel, it recognizes my second monitor properly as a Sony. But if you go into the Vista device manager, it has it setup as a Generic PnP Monitor. There are no Sony drivers that I can download (it says "no drivers available" on the sony page) and when I found my old disk, Vista won't let me install because it says the drivers aren't compatible.

So I'm thinking this is definitely a hardware issue, but I'm not sure if it's the display adapter (since both monitors will snow up) or if it's something with the older Sony Monitor. I don't mind swapping out hardware (my wife may, but I don't :-) ), but I want to make sure I'm swapping out the right hardware. Any advice is greatly appreciated. If you're in the Denver Colorado area, I'll buy you beers if you can help me. :-)

I have run 2 monitors for years and within Vista since Vista started without ever an issue on the one graphic card.

Firstly when I first started I ahd 2 different screen sizes and had nothing but problems.I would say that this is your problem as most video software like VLC (high resouce software) don't like to have different resaluions running and so will pickup the best of the 2 and affect the other ones resalution.

Since I had that issue I make sure I run the exact same monitors and I've never had a problem since.

Hope that help

Thanks Phil. I never had a problem on 32-bit XP, but what you describe makes sense. One of the monitors is wide aspect, and the other is not. I'll see about getting another wide aspect with the same dimensions. Thanks again!

ken