maddoctor. The reason I started looking around for another provider was the BTIndia experience. It took me 90 minutes to report a fault the last time! And I do mean the LAST time!

I think the best Forum for all types of Broadband problems and also the best Web site for gaining knowledge on Broadband issues, is at

http://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php

A good place to buy BT Modems and also other tackle, as and when they have it, is at

http://www.puzbie.co.uk

Puzbie's also have a good Forum. They sell quite a lot of stuff on eBay and do this mostly on a 'Buy it Now' basis.

Does anybody have any experience of Hanns G (or Hannstar) monitors? If so, are they reliable?

I'm contemplating picking up 4 of their 19" widescreen TFT's (AH191DP) at under 100 each which seems very good vfm given their spec.

Also would I need to change my Matrox splitter cables to DVI or could I get away with a VGA to DVI adaptor on each cable?

Hilary, the monitor you refer to has a power consumption of 55W per hour. An LG L194WT monitor ( 125.00 from Scan.co.uk ) uses 34W. Multiply the difference by four and the LG's will save you about 60 pence if used for, say, 10 hours per day. This soon adds up. Also, the LG is a far superior monitor, having a contrast ratio of 2000 to 1 and a very wide viewing angle. In other words, what you initially lose on the purchase price you will soon make up for in running costs and possibly fewer visits to Specsavers! The LG monitor comes with VGA to DVI adaptors.

http://accessories.euro.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=uk&l=en&s=dhs&cs=ukdhs1&sku=104703

With a 3 year warranty hilary, you know they are reliable

Thanks guys, I'll take a look.

And if you go for the Dells, ring them with the order - they're usually prepared to knock a bit off the price if you're spending a bit.

Excellent point you make, Pimpernel

Hilary, the LG L194WT monitor is now 114.97 at Currys. That is a fantastic price.

on currys website,

Due to high demand the following item(s) are currently unavailable.

In order to get the higher display quality on a digital display you do need a DVI connector, you can't convert a VGA signal to digital quality. There are splitter cables on Ebay but be very careful that they are specified to work with your model of Matrox card since there are different wiring configurations for different models even though the cables look the same.

to cut a long story short my graphics card can't keep up.

I want to run 4 monitors at 1920x1440 or better but I can't as this sends my cpu usage as shown in task manager through the roof whenever loads of trades start going through on L2 (i'm using advfn L2). Once this happens my L2 windows start lagging, my monitors start flickering as they try to refresh and I can't actually place trades with certainty that they will take place. Basically I haven't got a clue what's going on with the market and start missing entry and exit points.

I assume when the card can't keep up it then starts buffering data with the processor/hard disk on the pc and this is why my performance collapses? - not sure - I know enough to hazard guesses but i'm no technical expert.

I have currently a Matrox g450mms which I bought to replace a g200mms I had previously. I thought this would help my problem as it has 128mb ram but in reality in doesn't seem much better than the previous card which only had 32mb ram (although this was a dedicated 8 per screen). If someone told me it was actually worse I wouldn't disagree with them !

my guess is that although the card is technically capable of running 4 monitors at 2056x1536 in reality it just doesn't have the performance to do it.


I'm looking for a way forward on this as it's costing me loads of money as I can't see everything I want to see in real time.

some thoughts
1. just buy another card. don't mind spending 500 if it will do the job. Not sure what to buy
2. I could put my old g200mms card in as well as the g450mms and then say get each card to run 2 monitors only. This would reduce the load on the 450 card somewhat but i'm not sure if it creates another processing overhead which means it won't actually achieve faster performance.
3. I read somewhere about 2 years ago and my memory might be rubbish that windows now supports dual monitors. so can I put in the 256mb graphics card that came with my pc, use it to run say my primary display and let the 450 run the other 3 screens (or even more bizarrly put all 3 graphics cards in therby keeping the load on each one low)

Any help greatly appreciated.

What processor type and speed do you have in your machine CC, and how much main memory? I would have thought from the symptoms that you are more likely just to be running out of CPU or memory, or possibly bus bandwidth.

The memory on a graphics card is really only to do with getting more resolution/colours per monitor.

Turn on the 'show kernel times' option in task manager, if the CPU time is shown as being used mainly in the kernel (red line) then you might be right, otherwise I don't think it's the card. What processes are using the CPU? Also look at memory usage.

Hi Kayak,

It's a 3.0 ghz pent 4 with 3 gig of ram.

The reason I think it's something to do with the graphics card is that today I turned off one of the monitors in screen properties reduced one of the monitors to 1600x1280 from 2056x1536, dropped the colour quality down to lowest and all my problems went away.

my ie7 windows running level2 from advfn dropped from using up to 35% cpu time to more like an average of 2%.

I would hazard an extra guess in that it's something to do with java as well. all the java updates over the last 6 months seem to have been more and more processor intensive and whilst 6 months ago my machine could absorb the deficiency in my graphics card now it struggles. It's been suggested I should use firefox instead of ie7. Going to give that a whirl over the next week.

Tomorrow I intend to turn the forth monitor back on but i'm going to run it at low resolution to see if my machine can cope.

CC

For a start, download C Cleaner (an apt name, eh?) from the following reliable site (I know these guys, so you won't get any funny cookies, etc):-

http://www.computerdoctors.uk.net/pages/links.htm

and then clean up your machine.

With C Cleaner I would run the following:-

Cleaner:

1. For a start just tick IE and the Temporary Internet Files boxes with also
2. A tick in the Windows Explorer and Recent Documents boxes and also
3. A tick in the System , empty Recycle Bin and Temporary File boxes.

Issues:

Fix all the Issues, one by one if you have to make a decision on things, but you should be OK doing all of them.

Then run Spybot Search & Destroy. If you don't have it, it is also available as a download from the same site.

Then finally, do a Defragmentation.

You should find your machine works much faster. Furthermore, your existing graphics card should work much better too.

As Kayak says, the amount of RAM you have is also important. These days 2GB of RAM is almost a must. The Crucial web site have tools to help you determine what sort of RAM you need to buy. Perhaps 1GB in each slot may be best.

Hope that helps. :-)

I think you're just getting caught up in the processor workload involved in calculating the pixel values for four displays running at fine resolution and high colour values. With simple non-graphics output this would be done in the CPU, not the graphics card.

To improve matters, run at the lowest resolution you're happy with and 16 bit colours (32K) rather than 24 or 32 bit, you're unlikely to see the difference unless you display a lot of pictures.

Changing to a more up to date system architecture might also help, particularly Pentium D or higher processors which can multi-thread.

Thinking about it CC, you might like to ensure that you are running separate instances of IE for each window, i.e. click on the internet explorer shortcut each time rather than using Ctrl-N. That should give you better scheduling.

yup - already doing that Kayak - turned off tabbing too.

"With simple non-graphics output this would be done in the CPU, not the graphics card." - ahha - that makes sense because when i changed to 16 bit mode today the performance was great. Of course I was one screen down as well but i'll find out tomorrow whether that was the contributing factor as it'll be running tomorrow.

thanks for the help - i'll let you know how I get on.

CC

If you have a spare computer running XP Pro you could run a remote desktop from the spare on one of your screens. Remote desktop uses fewer resources than IE or most streaming applications. And if it does go wrong, you should be able to activate the local screen on your spare computer.

thanks everyone - quick update - turned on the 4th monitor this morning and performance was appalling. Then realised one of the screens was set to 32 bit quality rather than 16bit and voila everything is perfect now.

need to find a better solution than this as my screens aren't at as high a resolution as i'd like but at least everything i can see is working properly.