Adventures With a Dual Monitor System

My Mom got a new 19" monitor for Christmas, and let me take her old 15". My plan was to use her old monitor as a secondary monitor on my own system. That way, I could work even more efficiently. For example, I could have a webpage open on one screen, and a word document open on the other screen. This would be a real benefit because I could type and see the information I needed just by swiveling my head instead of switching back and forth between two windows. Basically if you have more territory to display stuff, it's better. If you can afford a huge monitor that's the way to go, but if you can afford to be given someone else's monitor for free that's even better.

Any way, in order to get my new dual monitor system going, I was fooling around with the BIOS. I don't really know what the acronym BIOS stands for, and that should have been my first sign that I shouldn't be fooling with it. Just so that it's perfectly clear, messing with your BIOS can seriously mess your computer in a real hurry. I'm talking you have to buy a new computer type messed so don't do it. I changed the BIOS to use an onboard video card instead of my AGP video card, and that was the incorrect thing to do, evidently.

When my computer tried to boot up, there was nothing. Well almost nothing, the internal fans came on. I was sick, because I knew that even if the computer itself was working, you can't change internal setting without a monitor. I started thinking that I had made a $1800 + gst mistake, not to mention the over 3 gigabytes of photos I have stored on my computer. (digital photos of my family,not the kind can be re-downloaded). Fortunately for me, the computer did boot up after about 10 minutes of waiting. I quickly burned all my photos and made backups of all my important data.

I emailed Ben Li, the Gauntlet computer expert and he gave me a few tips. What I ended up doing as per Ben's and my computer manual's suggestion was to short two solder points on the mother board using a piece of metal, to reset the memory on the BIOS. Luck shone on me again, and it worked.

-Gary Milner, won't be messing with the BIOS again.