Good Lord. After much gnashing of teeth I finally got my notebook configured to use three external monitors. Why is this so hard in this day and age? Am I the first person in the world that wants to run more than two monitors from a notebook? Why aren't all notebook manufacturers providing the hardware to get this done easily? I could see if I owned a standard notebook that isn't built for a professional computer user, but I own a Dell M90 notebook that is built for a hardcore geek.

Anyway, enough venting. On to the details...

Following is a detailed summary of everything I can recall of my adventures while trying to get my notebook to use three external monitors. I'll have to concentrate a bit on the details on my specific notebook, but I believe much of what I write here can also be applied to other Dell notebooks. Hopefully, if you're looking to do the same with your environment, you'll find a pearl of wisdom that will help you get set up properly.

Here is what I started with:

1. A Dell M90 notebook with a NVidia Quadro FX 2500M graphics card
2. Three 24" Dell flat panel monitors with a native resolution of 1920 x 1200

That's what I had to start. The M90 comes with two video connectors: A DVI and a VGA. I could run two external monitors using these connections very easily without a hitch at all. Getting three monitors to work was a bumpy ride, though.

The first thing I tried was buying a Matrox DualHead2Go Digital Edition device. I ordered from here:

CDW [1]

Matrox has their own site with a product description here:

Matrox DualHead2Go [2]

This device lets you split a single VGA connection into two DVI connections. By using this I could feed one monitor with the DVI connection from the notebook and two monitors with the VGA connection.

Unfortunately, I couldn't get it to work correctly regardless of what I tried--including having a technical discussion with a Matrox technical support person. One thing that disturbed me about this was that I had an ongoing discussion with the support person and I was trying the suggestions he mentioned, but after a few emails back in forth in which I tried his suggestions all correspondence stopped dead in its tracks. I wrote back to them to remind them that I was still here and I still hadn't gotten the product to fully work, but it fell on deaf ears. There is no excuse for such behavior in my book, so I'd suggest to stay away from Matrox. Any time a customer calls and is completely patient with support people (and I was very patient and courteous), something better should come of it other than the customer getting ignored.

The DualHead2Go device "sort of" worked. Although my monitors support an optimum resolution of 1920 x 1200, the best I could do after speaking with the Matrox support person was 1600 x 1200, which left a fuzzy display. This left me with three monitors running: one with a proper 1920 x 1200 resolution and two with a fuzzy 1600 x 1200 resolution. What to do next? Give up on my pursuit?

Nope.

I sent CDW a return of merchandise request and told them that what I'd like to do is to have them send me another Matrox device and when I received it I would return the one I had, thinking it might be defective. CDW accepted my request, but the wording of the email I was sent made it sound as though their protocol would be to receive my device and then send me another one with the same shipping that I sent my device back to them with. Now that I had three monitors working, though, albeit not perfectly, I didn't want to send the one I had back and wait for the roundtrip process of it getting to CDW and them sending the new one back to me. Once you have three monitors working its hard to go without. Plus, most importantly, my wife was due to deliver a baby within a week so I wanted to get things tied up and finished before that happened (she gave birth to a beautiful baby girl!).

I decided to order another Matrox device, thinking I would tell CDW as soon as I got it that I would send them mine back and that they didn't have to send me another one. However, they ended up sending me another anyway, even though I never sent mine back, so I then got two DualHead2Go devices in the mail the next day. Not only did they send me a replacement with trust that I would send my defective one back, but they one day expressed it to me. This, together with the fact that CDW sends you personal contact information of the person responsible for my account in every email they send, makes me highly recommend CDW. I am extremely impressed with their service and I will be using them in the future for all such purchases.

When the new DualHead2Go device arrived, I tried it out and it worked. I could now run at 1920 x 1200 on all three monitors. However, there are two problems with this device: The display is a little bit fuzzy and you don't really get true multi-monitor support.

Because the device splits a single signal into two, you'll never achieve clear 1920 x 1200 resolution on each of the monitors connected to it. It looks decent but not great. If this were the only issue I probably would have stopped my multi-monitor quest here, but with the Matrox you also don't get true multi-monitor application support as well. Each time you start up your notebook you'll have to set the display properties in order to get your monitors configured properly, and you can't use a utility like Ultramon [3] or like the nView utility that comes with some of the NVidia cards (which my M90 did).

So I decided not to stop here. Another problem I wanted to solve with my particular situation is that I have to plug in way too many cords to my laptop in order to use it with an external keyboard/mouse pair and external monitors. The location of my notebook when I am in this mode makes it difficult for me to plug all my connections in, which consist of:

1. Power cord
2. USB connection for the keyboard and mouse
3. Network connection
4. DVI to monitor connection
5. VGA to Matrox connection
6. USB to Matrox connection

That's a lot of connection-plugging to do all the time. My cohort Rob Scott is also interested in getting set up with multiple external monitors (I told him I'd be willing to be the guinea pig) and he mentioned that I might want to try the Dell D/Dock docking station because it has an external PCI expansion slot. With this slot, he reckoned, it might be possible to connect a video card to it and then run two video cards. This, together with the idea of being able to plug everything into the docking station and leave it plugged in all the time, was worth a shot.

The tricky part of this came down to:

1. Finding a video card for the PCI expansion slot of the D/Dock
2. If I added a video card to this slot and got it working, would I be able to run one or two monitors off of this card AND one or two off my notebook's internal card?

I decided to buy the D/Dock docking station regardless of the external monitor situation, just so I won't have to plug in all the cords all the time. That was a done deal. My next step was to find the right video card.

The PCI expansion slot in the D/Dock is what is known as either "half-height" or "low-profile". This means that not all video cards work in it. You have to buy one that is specifically labeled as "half-height" or "low-profile" or it won't fit. Also, don't confuse a "PCI" card with a "PCI Express" card. PCI Express is a newer technology that is a totally different form factor, so they don't work with each other. PCI Express has a lot more bandwidth (which is important when dealing with video cards) and PCI is an older technology that doesn't have nearly as much bandwidth. For my situation PCI is all I need because I'm not a gamer, but if you need 3D support you might be forced to use PCI Express for the extra bandwidth--which would make you have to use something like this:

Magma ExpressBox1 [4]

After a lot of research I came down to two families of cards: the ATI FireMV family and the NVidia NVS family. Each of these families of video cards support multi-monitor use. For instance, the FireMV 2400 card can feed four monitors, which is more than I need. I now had to choose which card I was going with and my choice came down to this:

1. The card needs to be PCI (and not PCI Express)
2. The card needs to be "low profile"
3. Although I'm still running Windows XP, the card needs to be Vista compatible

I began looking at the ATI FireMV product line and it seemed to offer everything I need. I thought if I got the FireMV 2200 PCI card that I could then run one monitor off of the D/Dock's DVI or VGA port and two off the FireMV card. However, the PCI FireMV cards do not officially support Vista, so that made me a little wary (the FireMV PCI Express cards do support Vista). This, together with the fact that I have an internal NVidia card on the M90 notebook, caused me to take a look at the NVidia NVS line. There are a number of NVS cards and they either support four or two monitors, but only one of them is PCI and not PCI Express: the NVS 280 PCI card.

My one other fear at this point was that I was afraid I would only be able to run the notebook's internal video card or the docking stations' PCI expansion card--but not both at the same time. I spoke with a helpful Dell representative and she mentioned that the BIOS of the M90 leaned toward only supporting one card at a time, but that she wasn't totally sure.

This brought up a possible solution of buying the ATI FireMV 2400 card because you can run four monitors off of it, but it's also roughly around $450. Add this cost in with the $299 for the docking station (sans tax) and the $1200 for the two new Dell 24-inch monitors and it was getting a little pricey for me.

Because the NVidia NVS 280 card supports Vista, costs around $150, and it should theoretically be compatible with the M90's internal NVidia video card (and its supporting nView software that has some nice multi-monitor software built in), I decided to purchase it and give it a try. If it didn't work I'd bite the bullet and live with the Matrox device for a while, at least until Dell comes out with a docking station with a PCI Express expansion slot. I decided I didn't want to buy the FireMV product because of its lack of Vista support.

I didn't try the D/Dock station until the NVS card arrived. My thinking here was that I didn't want my laptop to automatically configure use with the D/Dock without the video card. I'm not exactly sure what happens when you link up to a docking station for the first time, but some sort of software runs that detects the docking device so I didn't want to chance getting locked in a configuration that won't be the actual configuration.

I installed the NVS card in the docking station without a problem, hooked the cords up to it, hooked one monitor up to the DVI port on the docking station and the other two monitors to the VGA ports on the NVS card, docked the M90 in the station and powered up the system. What did I see? I saw what I feared: the two monitors hooked up to the NVS card had my Windows desktop on them running in 800 x 640 resolution and the other monitor (hooked up to the DVI port on the docking station) had nothing. This made me believe that only the NVS card was being used. Blech.

I readjusted the two monitors resolutions and I was left with only one monitor displaying anything, and what it was displaying was in 1920 x 1200 resolution but it wasn't quite right. I rebooted the system and ended up in a similar situation. Blech again.

I then shut everything off, undocked the M90 and booted it up by itself. After seeing Windows XP loading I was greeted with a blue screen of death. "Good Lord", I thought, "Is my computer hosed?" The message on the window said something about a hardware issue because of a memory parity check error. Oh no...time to panic a bit.

I rebooted again and got brought to a screen that asked whether I wanted to start in safe mode, start with the last known good configuration, or start normally. I chose to start with the last known good configuration and got brought to the blue screen of death again. Noooooo!!!!

I rebooted again and decided to choose to boot into safe mode. Windows started up fine in safe mode and I decided to take a look at the System Restore utility to see if that would have an effect. I didn't issue a restore point before trying all this, regrettably, but luckily the system had automatically issued its own restore point prior to hooking up to the docking station. "Wow," I thought, "Whoever did this restore functionality is a God."

I restored to this restore point and rebooted and got into normal Windows mode without a problem. Note to self: Whenever I mess around with hardware again, create my own restore point before doing so.

At this point I breathed a sigh of relief and was thinking I'd go back to the Matrox device, but...

I figured I'd give it one more shot. I booted the system up and used the F2 key to enter the system BIOS. I searched around a bit and discovered there is a setting that allows one to choose which video card one wants to use: The one from the docking device or the internal one. On my system the docking device was chosen by default, so I switched it to the internal card, shut the system down, docked it to the docking station, and rebooted. Another blue screen of death. Dagnabit!!!

I undocked the computer and booted into Windows without a problem. Hmmm.

I then went back into the system BIOS and switched it back to using the docking device's video card by default. For some reason I also thought, "Hmmm, if the two monitors hooked up to the NVS card are driven by the VGA connection, maybe I should try using the VGA port of the docking station instead of the DVI port." I followed this thought through and connected the VGA port before starting up Windows. Somehow, magically, everything started up fine and I had three monitors working absolutely perfect.

Just for kicks, because I wanted to make sure of things before writing this post, I wanted to try the docking stations's DVI connection again just to see if it was really a contributor to the problem I had. I did a system restore checkpoint with the good configuration I had, powered down the system, hooked up the docking station's DVI connector to the monitor instead of the VGA connector, and powered things up. I got the blue screen of death again. I shut down the system, connected the VGA connection from the docking station, powered everything up and everything worked fine.

In summary, this is what seems to be the most important:

1. Get the appropriate docking station for your notebook and make sure it has a PCI (or PCI Express) expansion slot.
2. If you want to run three monitors and you have a NVidia internal card, go with the NVidia NVS 280 video card if you have a PCI Expansion slot in the docking station. If you have a PCI Express expansion station you have more options with NVidia cards, but you'll want to go with the NVS line because each card supports either two or four monitors.
3. If you want to run more than three external monitors and you have a PCI expansion slot (and not PCI express) you'll have to go with the ATI FireMV 2400 card.
4. Create a restore point on your notebook before connecting to the docking station (Start | All Programs | Accessories | System Tools | Restore Point).
5. Start up your notebook unconnected to the docking station, F2 into the system BIOS, and make sure the video card used when starting up is set to docking station (this is only true if the notebook is connected to a docking station, otherwise it uses the internal card).
6. Connect everything to the docking station, including the PCI video card to the monitors.
7. Connect the VGA port of the docking station to a monitor.
8. Start the system up and you should be good to go.

If anyone tries this and has any comments to add, feel free to add them here. The more knowledge about this sort of thing the better off we all are. Not much is worse when dealing with computers than dealing with hardware issues.