Making the most of your single monitor
In the audio/video production world dual display (two monitors) is a must have. Unfortunately I'm on a laptop and I just can't drop a few hundred for another display. Quite a while back I stumbled across a way to make the most of my single laptop display. The secret is to add custom resolutions in my graphics card control panel so that I can increase the size of my desktop. Some might already be confused at this point, but hang on a little longer.
What I'm talking about is the viewable desktop on your computer monitor. Typically it is set at a resolution that will make your desktop fill up the entire monitor…right? For instance let's say that your desktop monitor is 15" and you have a resolution of 1024×768 (that's pixels). If you were able to add a custom resolution of 2048×1536 that would now make your desktop twice as wide and twice as high. Your 15" monitor is still only going to view a 1024×768 area on that desktop, but you can simply use your mouse to "pan" around the desktop to see the rest of it. Still with me?
What that means is that you can have multiple applications open side by side and be able to see them by simply "panning" around the desktop by moving your mouse to the edge of the screen in which you want to pan. I really need to put up a video showing this, but hopefully you can picture what I'm talking about.
Now, to make this happen there are a couple of things you need to know first. What kind of graphics card do you have; nVidia, ATI or the Intel Graphics Accelerator that is actually a shared graphics processor. For my laptop, I have a nVidia 6800 graphics card. So I went to www.laptopvideotogo.com and downloaded a modified driver for my card. There are instructions on that site for everything you need to do to get the drivers downloaded and installed. They also have drivers for ATI cards that will do the same thing. One thing that the modded drivers do is add a bunch of custom resolutions to their .inf file that allows you to then add these resolutions in the nVidia control panel.
FYI: I just tried fiddling around with the Intel Graphics Controller properties on my work computer and you can get it to make the higher resolutions available so you can choose them. However once I chose a higher resolution I was getting an error message that said "Cannot Display the Video Properties" or something to that effect. So this may or may not work for embedded graphics chips. However if you have a dedicated video card, ie. a nVidia or ATI card, you owe it to yourself to explore this option. It is not hard, I promise and it will really add a tremendous amount of flexibility when you're working with programs where desktop space is a premium. Start fiddling around and working through your graphics control panel, that's the best way to try to learn it. If you have questions you can post them and I will try to help you sort it out.
Just try it, you're not gonna break anything.
