Dual video cards -- 2nd card won't work

[John Blaustein]

I have an ASUS motherboard and have been using a Matrox G450 AGP dual head
video card with two monitors. It works perfectly. I want to use a monitor
profiling device -- Colorvision's OptiCal with Spyder -- but until recently,
it would not work with dual monitors. Now, Colorvision has a beta version
of the OptiCal software that will work with dual monitors, BUT it won't work
with a dual monitor video card. It needs two separate video cards to work.

OK... so I bought a second video card -- an inexpensive PCI card to run my
second monitor. I disabled dual monitor support in the Matrox driver,
installed the second video card, attached my second monitor to the new PCI
card and restarted. Windows XP Home recognizes the second card and installs
the driver, but nothing happens -- the screen is blank. Checking Device
Manger shows a yellow exclamation sign and Properties says the device will
not start -- Code 10. The XP Troubleshooter suggest uninstalling the device
and reinstalling. I did that, but no luck.

I installed the drivers for the new video card, and still no luck. The new
card is a "no-name" S3 Savage IX card. I see no reason it's not working. I
tried two different PCI slots and still no luck. I have made no BIOS
changes and wouldn't know what to try there.

Any suggestions will be much appreciated!

Thank you.

John

 

[Jason Tsang]

There are hardware limitations in that card that won't allow it to work as a
secondary card.

Suggest you see this page to see the lowest generation of cards that will
work
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;307397

and pick something that is listed there, or of a later generation.

 

[John Blaustein]

Jason,

Thanks for the quick reply. I really appreciate that.

Oh well... an $18 video card was too good to be true I guess. Perhaps you
or someone else can suggest an inexpensive PCI card on that list that will
work along side of my Matrox G450 (which runs my primary monitor).

Again, thanks.

John

 

[Jason Tsang]

Any ATI 9000 series card or Nvidia Geforce4 (mx or non mx) should be
relatively cheap at this time.

 

[John Blaustein]

OK, Jason... I'll look for those. Many thanks!

John