two virtual monitors on one screen?

[ubernoober]

I've been trying to find a neat way to run games in most of the window but leaving enough screen real estate to access instant messages and other programs. Many of my PC games don't have the option to run in a window, so the only way I thought could resize them would be by making multiple virtual monitors. I found Virtual Display Manager (http://www.ishadow.com/?tabid=115). This works when clicking the maximizing button on windows, but still allows applications to go into fullscreen mode (Ex. youtube video in full screen). Any suggestions?

 

[Okedokey]

By a cheap and cheerful second hand 15" monitor and use Windows function to have a 2 montiors stretching the desktop.

 

[Flaring Afro]

^ what i'd do. hell, i see cheap monitors going for free on craigslist fairly often. if you cut your monitor, that means you cant see left and right very well.

 

[kkpudge7]

two monitors ftw..I have been using two screens for about a year now, and I will never use anything less.

 

[viper110110]

The only problem with dual monitors is that they're sorta hard to use on airplanes and buses.

Some video cards allow you to run a higher resolution than your monitor, which would give you extra space

 

[The_Other_One]

http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/

I just happened to come across this. It's very similar to what most copies of Linux have where you can select between multiple desktops. Normally a nuance but I had gotten quite a bit of use out of it recently.

 

[ubernoober]

I'm open to getting a small secondary monitor, but I'm going to be doing this on a laptop and will most likely not be stationary for very long. Additional hardware would make it much tougher.

Also, thanks the_other_one, but I was looking for virtual monitors, not desktops. Basically the goal was to make the computer think I had two screens basically glued together, side by side.

 

[Drenlin]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824185014

USB powered, and doesn't hog your GPU. The 7" version would be better but it's out of stock...

 

[ubernoober]

I was thinking a portable monitor like this: http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/bfa3/

Most likely though I'll buy a 99 cent vga to rca tv adapter and hook it up to an old portable dvd player. Cheap and useful.

 

[tlarkin]

Use multiple desktops or virtual machines and switch back and forth between them. One thing that Linux and OS X do very well, gotta love multiple desktops.

 

[ubernoober]

I used to use otaku software, which was really nice. Do you know of any software that would bee able to display more than one of these multiple desktops at once? (With each one still accessible)

 

[The_Other_One]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824185014

USB powered, and doesn't hog your GPU. The 7" version would be better but it's out of stock...

It doesn't hog your GPU, but it hogs the CPU. I suspect there'd be a larger performance drop using a USB video card/LCD than a standard secondary display off the GPU.

Most likely though I'll buy a 99 cent vga to rca tv adapter and hook it up to an old portable dvd player. Cheap and useful.

That will not work... Well, it is very unlikly. Only a few video cards (I think older Matrox and ATI GPUs) support VGA to RCA converters.

 

[ubernoober]

I already bought one off eBay. It is VGA on one end and splits to both RCA and S-Video. I've used my computer before on VGA to S-Video, so if it does fail I can go with that.