Those lovely people at Dell have sent me an extra 17 inch Ultra Sharp monitor. So I've take it home and plugged it into my laptop. I've managed to get it so the mouse works over both screens, but it won't allow me to select the large monitor as the primary (it's greyed out), and I've no idea how to run programs (eg Toca 2) on the better screen.

Any ideas?

most laptop won't support dual-screens as it requires extra hardware (alhtough the latest Compaq 6300s do). On most laptops, you can switch between the laptop screen and the external screen by pressing the Function key and F5 (or key with screen icon on it). But generally, you can't extend your desktop to both screens.

Most of the latter day ATI cards support dual screens. Depends on your hardware...

Most of the time you can just switch the laptop screen off and use the external one. Usually the key combo is Fn+F5. This will cycle through laptop, laptop+monitor and monitor screens.

Alternatively of course, you can set up the monitors to span, then run your games windowed. Drag them across to the second screen and maximise. Desktop on one screen, game on the other.

David

The laptop has a video card - nvidia geoforce - it will happly display the other monitor and I can took at Windows based progams, Firefox, Outlook etc on it and have the mouse working between them. It's when I start games programs that do not allow you to drag the window around that I can't shift them to the new screen.

I've tried Fn F5 and various others and nothing. I would quite happily just have the monitor work and the laptop screen off it I could do that.

Any further thoughts?