Enabling Dual Monitors with software

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This is a follow up to my post Increase Productivity with Dual Monitors. You will need the right software.

Having multiple monitors can become confusing if you have only 1 taskbar. The stock Windows setup will show 1 taskbar on one or both monitors. This makes it hard to know which monitor your application window is displayed on. The solution is to have a multi-taskbar software app installed. I recommend Multimon.

Monitor 1: Only apps running on that monitor show up in its own taskbar

Monitor 2: Only apps running on monitor 2 show up in its own taskbar

From the authors site:

“What it does:

• It adds second taskbar to the extended desktop on Monitor 2 (either right or left)
• It can add third taskbar to the second Extended monitor if you have 3 monitors setup.
• It shows only applications from that Monitor
• It hides the applications on Monitor 2 from normal Windows Taskbar
• Adds a Move to Monitor button to all windows applications.
• Add Text Clipboard Extender (new 1.1.)”

Best of all it’s free!

Now that our taskbars are tidied up our next order of business is to be able to reorient our desktop from landscape to portrait and vice versa. The software iRotate will achieve this goal. No it is not some fancy white Apple product. iRotate will allow you to change the orientation of your screen from landscape to portrait. Portrait is quite useful for editing documents for example. You can’t just physically rotate your screen and have your screen reorient itself. You need some software to do so. Windows doesn’t do it out of the box.

You may not control the world, but you can at least now you can control your desktop.