With a second monitor and the required connector on your PC, setting up Windows 10 to display on two screens is easier than ever. Having a second monitor can help to increase productivity and allow you to say more organized when using your computer.
Setting Up a Dual Display
Matching up the resolution and size of your two chosen monitors will give the results but even mismatched monitors can work really well in a dual format.
Step 1:
You will obviously need to ensure that your PC has the required connection for two monitors: two HDMI, VGA or DVI ports, or a combination of these. Check the back of your PC tower or the side of your laptop to find out. With your PC turned off, connect both monitors to the available ports.
Step 2:
Boot up the computer and log in. Windows should automatically detect that two displays are connected and you should see both of them displaying a desktop. Your main display will have all of your icon on it, whilst the new second display will be blank apart from the taskbar along the bottom.
Step 3:
You will now need to configure the dual monitor setup to your liking. Windows 10 allows you to easily choose how the dual monitors display. Press Windows Key+P to see the Project side panel. Here you can choose from PC Screen Only, Duplicate, Extend or the Second screen Only options.
Step 4:
PC screen only and Second Screen only are fairly self-explanatory, displaying an image on one or the other screens. Duplicate is also fairly easy to understand, showing exactly the same display on both screens. Extend turns the two monitors to one long screen that you can spread out across.
Step 5:
The extend option is the one which needs the most setting up. On the main display, right-click anywhere on the desktop and choose Display settings from the Action menu. Scrolling to the bottom of the display settings gives you another way to choose the display mode.
Step 6:
At the top of the display, settings are the two-display side by side. 1st is your main display and 2nd is the secondary display. Which side of the screen the two monitors “join” at (which side allows you to move on to the second monitor) is controlled by dragging the display boxes here to the left or right.
Step 7:
You can view settings for each display independently, by clicking on the one you want to see, and then scrolling down. You can change the scaling, orientation and resolution of each display to best suit the specification of the monitor if it is the case that the two monitors have different maximum resolutions.
Step 8:
If you don’t want to see the taskbar on both displays, go to setting > Personalisation > Taskbar and scroll down to multiple displays. You can then choose to turn off the taskbar on the second display. You can also spread a single wallpaper across both screens by selecting Span in background settings.
Step 9:
Spreading out across the two monitors in Extend mode is as easy as clicking and dragging a window, be that a browser window, app or anything else, to the “joined” side of the main screen. Just keep the mouse pointer moving and it will continue on the second screen seamlessly.
Step 10:
Depending on the graphics card software you have installed (Radeon for example), you will usually have further display options for the second monitor in the graphics adapter settings. This might include Virtual Super Resolution and GPU scaling, helping you match up resolution settings.
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