Multiple Monitors, Vista, UltraMon 3 Beta

Am an avid supporter of multi-monitor set-ups. Once you end up using two or more screens - it’s very hard to go back down to one.

At the moment my set-up consists of:

2x Samsung 940B’s

1x IBM/Lenovo Advanced Mini Dock

1x T60 [ATI Mobility Radeon x1400]

Works quite well, as soon as it’s docked, it recognises the two monitors (one plugged in using VGA, other DVI), and off it goes.

In Windows, it’s quite simple - plug in another monitor, and through Display Settings - select where each screen is relatively to the others.

Unfortunately, even in Windows Vista - 5th Version of the monolithic, GUI - OS [95,98, 2000,XP, ->Vista), it is has yet to cater for a spanning taskbar, one that would cross all monitors.

That and other shortcomings are fixed by a nice program called UltraMon. It allows for a multitude of features concerning multiple monitors. One’s that I use:

• the spanning taskbar
• Windows Title Bar

Puts icons near the close button of the window, that allow you to quickly with a click, move the windows to another monitor, or stretch it across all monitors

• Wallpaper

Finally - a tool which looks at setting distinct wallpapers for each screen, that is easy to use, and is persistent across reboots as well as docking/undocking my T60

Now with UltraMon 3 Beta - you can finally use it in Vista.

Several problems though:

• Docking the laptop - Causes multiple taskbars to be rendered on the secondary display

• Freezing whenever some applications are launched - ie. FileZilla

With all these, am still a hapy camper, and absolutely love the app. Just hope they hurry up, and release the final.