ATI and nVidia Display Conflicts

[howdena]

Hi,

I've been trying with limited success, to get dual displays going on my Compaq SR1639UK PC.

The PC comes with an onborad video controller and an additional PCI video controller. On delivery, the PCI card set in the BIOS as the Primary Display and the setup instructions tell you to attach the monitor to that VGA port from that card. The onborad controller appears to be disabled in this configuration since plugging anything into it gives no display.

I've been through HP's support centre and they're pretty useless, not really even accepting that this model has two video ports despite my assurances!

I've dug around a bit more and found out the following:

The PC has an MSI motherboard, MS-7184, known as AmethystM by HP, with an AMD Athlon 64 3700+ processor. The onboard video adapter is an ATI Radeon Xpress 200 and the PCI video controller is an nVidia GeForce 6200SE.

In order to get anything out of the onboard video controller, I've had to change the BIOS so that the onboard adapter is the Primary Display Adapter. When I do this, I get video out of both ports - great - partway there.

However, the onboard port's output is only VGA resolution and the device manager shows that there is a video controller without drivers loaded (under Other Devices). I've been across to ATI and downloaded the drivers for this controller and this is where the problems seem to start. I don't seem to be able to have both the ATI Catalyst control panel and the nVidia nView control panel installed simultaneously. Or at least they don'[t survive a reboot. (I have had both displays working as I want them to, but on reboot it all fails again.) Does this surprise anyone? After installing the ATI drivers and rebooting, when I click on the Settings tab of the Display Properties dialogue I get a message saying that the drivers for the nVidia card are for an earlier version of windows!

I have tried lots of combinations of installing ATI drivers first, then the nVidia ones, vice versa, different versions of the drivers, using Safe mode ... and I've failed to get them both working together. Where I'm at now then is no drivers installed on the onboard card (so it's just VGA resolution which isn't ideal, and things like Standby mode are unavailable now) and the latest nVidia drivers installed for the PCI card. The onboard controller is the Primary display so my Start button and taskbar is on that screen and I have to drag windows to the other screen to work with (where I get a decent resolution).

So my question is, how can I get the ATI and nVidia video controllers to work together? I really only want the ATI controller to display at SVGA resolution, not all the fancy 3D effects or anything - I don't to gaming! Is there a really basic driver that I can use instead of the full ATI set?

If you got to the end of this post, thanks for reading! I hope it makes sense.

Andy