Multi-monitor (2 or more graphics cards)

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Just thought I'd share this "feature" as it caught me short when I decided to install Vista so I could get a look see at the reality behind the hype.

To give you a quick intro I have a Gigabyte GA-8NXP-9 motherboard with a Radeon X800 PCI-E and an older Radeon 7000 PCI..

No vista driver has been written specifically for the 7000 but as it's the primary boot card it was picked up as a legacy PnP video adaptor..

Where things got hinky is that the X800 was picked up but it was having problems and for the whole time I've been getting drive corrupt messages for my Vista drive..



I finally realised that I'd heard tell of some changes in multimonitor support in Vista and found this nugget:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device...imonVista.mspx

All graphics adapters in a system must use the same display driver model. That is, all of them should either be running XPDM or WDDM. The driver models are mutually exclusive, and Windows Vista does not allow the simultaneous loading of both an XPDM driver and a WDDM driver.

If a system has one graphics adapter with a XPDM driver and another with a WDDM driver, then Windows Vista will choose the POST device, which is the one with VGA resources. This is commonly referred to as the "VGA adapter."

Now this is not immediately obvious and it may not be the complete cause (still waiting for the 10th chkdsk to complete before I can test this theory) but if it is, then you need to get rid of the WDDM driver for the second card and install the XP version (or at least that's what I understand from the article above).

Why it's causing file corruptions and not just giving me an error I'll not know but hopefully this proves useful to anyone experiencing a similar weirdness.

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Just a quick note for anyone with multimonitor ATI cards on Vista 64 bit.

Having just reinstalled to play with 64 bit I discovered that ATI didn't sign the drivers only package for version 7.7 of their drivers for X600/X800.. Net result is that the display drivers don't work at all and you get a single screen and "problem" icons in hardware.

Instead you need to install the full catalyst included version of 7.7 and it works fine...