I don’t want to hear a another peep about the ‘AI future’ until they make multi monitor support not suck
The AI future would be bad enough on its own, eroding the human spirit and upending the economy in the name of a homework cheating revolution, but I find it especially galling that Microsoft is spending so much money trying to get me to turn on Copilot in Windows 11 and not fixing basic features that still suck. Microsoft is trying to sell me a turbo-charged Clippy that won’t stop taking pictures of my credit card number, but it can’t even fix its own multi-monitor support.
Now, granted, I have a weird setup. Which is to say I have the forbidden secret best setup that the government and media don’t want you to know about: Three monitors, but only one in use at a time. My old LCD for work and some gaming, a shiny new OLED exclusively for gaming (to avoid risk of burn-in), and a 19-inch Diamondtron CRT for retro PC gaming. A tool for every occasion—when Microsoft decides to let me.
My great struggle, my eternal nemesis, is that my PC, for all its orders of magnitude greater processing power than its distant ancestors that put men on the Moon, cannot determine when a monitor is “off” or “on.”
The Shadow Realm
My OLED, blessedly, has some kind of space age firmware that tells my PC when it is turned off, but my older LCD and much older CRT do not. If I just flick the power switch, Windows will still read them as being there, phantom desktops that I can lose my cursor in. To use my patented “Triple Monitor, One at a Time™” setup requires a rickety scaffolding of Windows shortcuts that feels like it could collapse at any time.
A “disconnect this display” option buried in Windows’ display settings will seal the entrance to the Shadow Realm, but it’s also—and I think you know exactly what I mean when I say this—kinda fucky. My monitors will change their order and settings unbidden when I reconnect them. The CRT, in particular, is a hothouse orchid when it comes to this.
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My only real workaround has been the intuitive shortcut everyone knows by heart, Windows plus Shift plus P, which brings up a menu I’m pretty sure is primarily targeted at business guys using projectors to make presentations about business. The options “PC Screen Only” and “Second Screen Only,” have been my salvation. Windows seems to recognize the combo of OLED and LCD as my “second screen,” while my CRT is the “PC Screen.” I have to select one or the other depending on which monitor I want to use.
This delicate equilibrium was upended when I recently upgraded my graphics card, with the LCD and OLED unmoored from each other as the “second screen” and the lack of options for dealing with three screens really chafing my hams. I just had to manually disable the monitors for a while, fuckiness notwithstanding.
An added pain was that my mouse wouldn’t stay locked to my OLED anymore, even when playing a game and checking the lock mouse to screen option (if available) in the damn options. Unless I fully disabled my LCD when using the OLED, my cursor would seamlessly pass from Baldur’s Gate 3 to my empty desktop (or blank, powered down screen), rendering the mouse-centric RPGs I love borderline unplayable on my fancy display.
I’m happy to report, though, that my Win+Shift+P trick just started working again for some reason, even though I did not do or change anything. Ditto for mouse lock. I started replaying Pillars of Eternity, and it was just fine.
I can’t lay this entirely at Microsoft’s feet: I’m trying to do a weird thing with my PC, but it should just work. For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t getting a motherboard screen on boot up anymore, which kept me from accessing my BIOS settings. It’s because my PC defaults to displaying it all on my CRT, which is usually turned off.
But am I crazy for thinking that someone should be able to figure this out, and not just as an unadvertised feature on premium new monitors? If not motherboard manufacturers like Gigabyte, surely mighty Microsoft could just figure it out. I need one of the podcasts Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella gets AI summarized for himself to incept the idea into his big, genius brain.
