'Luckless' said:

'tstrimple' said:

Multiple monitors has worked just fine on windows for ages, often defaulting to cloning what is on your desktop which is typically the behavior desired on a projector. I don't understand what problems people have with it, especially people who would frequent these forums.

The problems I usually see are a result of changes in settings, and things simply not acting as expected/desired. The Overhead and presenter views option tends to cause people the most headaches, (The one where they want PowerPoint to display one screen to the audience, and then another screen with the presenter's notes on the laptop.) as they often end up just cloning the screen.

Of course, one of the other common problems seems to be when the system had been setup for some dual display mode, and the user wants to clone,…

But of course the issue I see the most often stems from resolution errors, where the projector is at one size, and the laptop is at another, and they just don't play nice at all.


(And all this reminds me: I should likely find the time over the weekend to upgrade my netbook to 10.x, it is still running 8.04 or whatever. Multiple monitors doesn't play as nicely as I would have liked in this version, and I changed something awhile ago that now causes my script to make it play nice fail.)

Right click your desktop, go to properties. You can control the resolution for both monitors, as well as the multiple monitor mode you want to use. Alternatively you can go to the control panel and choose display properties. On Windows 7 they named it "Connect to an external display" under the control panel. It's very straightforward as to my confusion as to why people have problems with it.

'Luckless' said:

Oh yes, but the kicker is that some systems get these overridden by other 'helpful' software, or any number of other conflicts in the system cause them to simply not work. One of my classmates has a laptop that refuses to acknowledge the existence of the projector in one of the labs, but is fine with every other projector on campus.

So you're judging windows based on some crappy software that is installed, not the OS itself. Understood. OEM software DOES suck and is painful to use compared to a clean Windows install.

If you're interested in trying and trust my word for it: for starting up windows 7, connecting the projector, pushing windows+P and opening the powerpoint it took me 19.7secs on my current laptop.

Actually I would be interested if people tested this specific case and reported results

'Fiddler' said:

- time to launch Evince: <1 second (try doing that with Adobe Acrobat)

Time to launch the last version of Adobe Acrobat (Adobe Reader X) is less than 1 second as well, at least on my desktop: AMD Athlon 64 X2 2.9 GHz, 3 GB RAM, Windows 7 x86 Enterprise.

Please, please don't hold up Acrobat Reader as an example of why Windows is OK. It's not. Acrobat Reader is an abomination and a pox on humanity. Use Foxit.