Macbook Pro + Windows + Dual Monitors = Painful
I didn’t think it would be so hard to just get my taskbar and icons on a second monitor using Windows on my Macbook Pro. It doesn’t seem like a whole lot of people run Windows on the Mac, so there isn’t a whole lot of resources if you get stuck. It takes a lot of digging to find the real answers. Turns out the display drivers from NVIDIA/Apple for Windows don’t support making an external monitor as a primary monitor. It only gives the option of making the laptop display primary. This limitation is very painful and kept me up for hours/days searching for registry hacks, hacked drivers, and more. Here’s what I found that didn’t work and what did:
Registry hack: Fail = True;
The Apple nVidia driver INF file is missing 2 registry entries for using external display as primary in a dual display setup. The keys you need are:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Video{C0FF928A-9E27-40AE-845F-E0D8A8E03216}\0000
“DualViewAllow2ndViewAsPrimary”=dword:00000001
“DualViewMobile”=dword:00000002Do not import these lines directly. Do them manually via REGEDIT. The hardware ID (C0FF928A-9E27-40AE-845F-E0D8A8E03216) is different in every system, so put the keys in the correct video hardware key in your system.
Turns out Windows didn’t like the registry hack and I couldn’t get anything up on the display, even though I was able to get the primary display option on my external monitor with the hack. I also had to guess which hardware ID to use, since there were 5 hardware key options. I tried the logical one with a lot of registry entries for display modes/settings under the 0000 folder.
Updated Supported Drivers: Fail = True;
Again I began searching for something else, but there’s not a whole lot of information on this topic. I contemplated installing a different set of drivers for Windows, but the one I found referenced from Apples discussion page was older than the current driver I have now. There was a recent update for Boot Camp to 2.1 this summer which looks like it included new NVIDIA drivers.
Updated Un-supported Drivers: Fail = True;
Not having a real solution from Apple I looked into the drivers from http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/ however I found a few posts that said it didn’t help or wasn’t performing as well. I’m doing game development (XNA) on my laptop and I don’t want to ruin a working system or introduce incompatibilities; so stability is very important for me at the moment. I decided to try and avoid non-standard drivers and look for another alternative.
nView Desktop Manager: Success = True;
Here is the solution that I had been looking for; it was something I found last year, but forgot about since I didn’t have dual monitors. To enable it you’ll need to go to ‘Control Panel’ -> ‘NVIDIA nView Desktop Manager’ -> click ‘Enable’. Now you should see the nView Properties option when you right click on your desktop and you’ve just opened a whole can of worms for customizing your desktop.
- You can move your Taskbar/icons to your second display by the ‘Tools’ tab and ‘Move to Display’ button.
- Set multiple desktop backgrounds using the ‘Desktops’ tab and the Properties button. There’s a check box to ‘Allow different backgrounds per display’
- Hotkeys to perform various tasks related to windows management
- Profiles to save/load settings when switching between a dual monitor/single display setup.
- Transparency effects on window drags and more…
Edit: As much as I’d like this solution to work all the time; it still has bugs. Dialogs on different applications appear on the laptop display and the software can sometimes be glitchy for the development work I’m doing. WinForms development with Visual Studio 2005 Express seems to bug it out the most and causes Icons to flicker. I’m not sure if that flicker is because of the dual monitor setup or from WinForm editing in VS 2005.
It’s not the elegant solution and it seems to also kill the graphics device when you switch profiles using the Desktop Manager.
When that happens firefox and visual studio will crash. Not very fun…
Hi there, thank you for your post, I ran into the same problems MacBook Pro with NVIDIA 8600M GT and tried pretty much the same things you did. Here’s the best solution I found:
- download latest NVIDIA drivers from:
http://laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=20809
extract the driver to a specific folder then download patch from the same site (nvar.inf) and replace the file in the extract folder.
This way you have the latest driver installed, although I’m not sure whether it would affect the warranty or cause problems.
Second, I had huge problems with the DVI cable, so I used DVI to VGA adapter instead and all went smooth.
Worth to note, my previous MacBook Pro with ATI Radeon X1600 did not have any problems with dualscreen.
Also http://www.ultramon.com is worth a look.
Thanks.
1. I looked into the laptopvideo2go site, but I was afraid of messing up my graphics drivers. I’m doing a lot of programming with graphics right now and I’m trying to keep the system stable. I’m not sure if using a non-certified driver on my macbook pro would cause compatibility issues, so I’ve avoided them.
Using those drivers won’t affect the warranty, since you’re in Windows and Apple doesn’t really support it. I’m not worried about that.
2. I haven’t tried the VGA only because I have my VGA on my monitor being used by my xbox 360, so that leaves the DVI for video from the macbook pro. It works really well on the Mac side of things; unfortunately the same thing can’t be said for the Windows side.
The issue is a driver problem where NVIDIA and Apple didn’t work together to get it working for Windows. I’m hopeful that an update to Boot Camp will fix this issue.
3. In addition to dual monitors I use Synergy which lets me share mouse/keyboard between multiple computers and multiple OS’s. I have a Windows desktop and a macbook pro that can share input in Windows/Windows and Windows/Mac setups. Check it out at: http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/
Documentation can be a bit frustrating to setup via command line in Mac, so I would use the GUI synergy program called: SynergyKM http://sourceforge.net/projects/synergykm
I tuned my configuration a bit further and I’m happy to say it almost works the way it should. At this stage, I have:
1. Removed bootcamp NVIDIA drivers
2. Installed tuned drivers from laptopvideo2go website
3. Rebooted PC and installed the laptopvideo2go driver
4. Rebooted PC
By doing this, I can select the external monitor as main display, but the Windows taskbar does not move the display automatically. You need to drag it to the external monitor desktop. With the DVI connector I had nothing but troubles because after reboot the external monitor’s resolution would change to 1600 * 1000 instead of the original 1680 * 1050 I put in place before reboot although the PC says the resolution is still 1680 * 1050. Because of that I switched to the VGA cable which is not causing this problem. The bug now is when I reboot without the external monitor plugged in: all my desktop icons start moving all over the place and don’t get back in place when I reboot with the external monitor attached. So I decided to use the laptop screen as primary display and configure UltraMon to send the applications to the external monitor automatically. After at least 8 hours I can start to work almost as normal. The NVIDIA drivers are just a pain, I wish I could exchange the card with the ATI one I had in my previous MacBook Pro. It was just sooo easyy..
Forgot to say you should try the modded drivers as I have not seen any glitches so far and it is always possible to reinstall the original bootcamp drivers later (I did it several times during my hours of testing for the best solution).
Good luck!
Thanks, I’ll give it a look when I have some spare time after I finish this quarter of classes.
There are utilities that will give you a taskbar on your second/third/etc monitor in Windows. The one I use is “UltraMon.” I couldn’t live without it. Sucks about the primary monitor issues though.
Yeah, I need to use that program, just haven’t gotten around to it.
I have run into the same problem; please check my post here. It describes how to modify the NVIDIA INF file so that the necessary registry keys are added for allowing the external monitor to become the primary monitor.
This works, but I cannot hotplug the external monitor like I can on MacOS. Every time I have to set up everything manually in the NVIDIA system panel, then I have to reboot because the !@#% NVIDIA driver doesn’t detect the monitor properly and limits the maximum resolution to 1024×768. After rebooting Windows, I can set all resolutions again, and everything works until I unplug the monitor again. Does anyone have a solution for this?
I got tired of messing with settings on XP and I upgraded to Windows 7 RTM. Windows 7 is definitely a step up from Vista and I would recommend switching from XP when you have the chance.
I no longer have any issues setting the external monitor as primary in Windows 7. Overall the upgrade has been pretty smooth.
Windows XP on MPB with Bootcamp
Hi, does anyone know how to switch between the displays (lcd to external and back)? Dual display works (also in clone also in extended mode) – but I can not turn off the LCD of the MBP and let the external display run while working on external (mac) keyboard. It runs well under OSX snow leopard but does not seem to work under Windows XP.
Yes. You need to use the NVIDIA control panel and it has a section for multiple monitors. One option is to just use a single display and set it to your external monitor. That will turn off the LCD on the Macbook Pro. You can switch it back when you’re done, or it may automatically switch when you unplug the DVI cable.