A few months ago i got a second monitor for my developer rig, and that has really increased my productivity.

Any developer who has gone from one to two monitors, will tell you that they can never go back.

In a fit of irritation a few days ago, i finally got around to ordering the third monitor, that I have been contemplation for a while. I got the 24" BenQ FP241W 1920x1200 TFT Wide, and it is as nice as the reviews will tell you:

http://www.trustedreviews.com/displays/review/2006/09/13/BenQ-FP241W-24in-Widescreen-Monitor/p1

Eagerly i started my day with unpacking the beast, and rearranging my desk fitting the new larger screen in between my laptop on the left and my old second screen on my right.

But obviously I forgot my thinking hat, while ordering the third screen, as although I have 2 outputs on my IBM Advanced Dock, one DVI and one VGA, the graphics card really only has one output; therefore i had to live all of yesterday still with only two screens, although a much larger primary screen.

But now i ran into the problem, that I needed a second graphics card to put in the docking station, but Vista being Vista, only allows one driver running. If you attempt to load another driver, it will disable one of them. So i basically needed a graphics card, that would fit in my dock (only half-size PCIe cards fit) and that would run on the same driver as the ATI FireGL 5250 card in my Laptop.

The closest i could get to a solution would be the FireMV 2200, that fits in my dock, and it was in the FireXX family. It did however seem to run on a different driver. I decided to order it, and se if it would work out.

Today the mail arrived with the package, and i mounted the new card. Now what happened was, the FireMV driver was installed and the driver was then again disabled by Vista. All screens went black for a while, and all three monitors came back with an image ... yeah !!

Most likely Vista is defaulting to the standard VGA driver, which isn't exactly what i was hoping, but while im looking into that, I actually have all three monitors running with Aero and everything.

While browsing i came across a clever little app called Ultramon. It gives you a taskbar with the actual windows on each screen, without the start button. This is great stuff.