NT Can Do Multiple Monitors, Too!
Macs are famous for their ease of setup and use. One feature Apple liked to
show off in the mid-80s was how quickly you could add a second or third monitor;
just drop the card in the system and restart. If you want to rearrange the
display, putting one monitor to the right of another or two on top of a third,
just drag the pictures of them around in the Monitors control panel. Ditto for
the menu bar; just pick it up and move it within Monitors. If you're unsure
which monitor is which, the Identify button will tell you.
To this day, the religious wars online between Mac and PC zealots often
revolve around this feature. And until recently, Windows had no corresponding
capability.
Microsoft has made strides. With the right display card, NT can have
several or many monitors hooked up. This support is not yet in the Mac's league
for ease of use, but it's closer. With plug 'n' play in a year or so, NT may
catch up to the Mac in that regard.
The customer in question, the commodities broker I mentioned last month,
needed two or three big monitors to run its trading program, which uses all that
screen real estate. The company chose the Colorgraphic video card, which can
support up to four monitors on a single PCI card. (Colorgraphic also makes ISA
and PCMCIA multiple-monitor cards.) To the Colorgraphic card, the customer
hooked 21" Nanao color monitors set at 1280 x 1024 resolution. With three
monitors on one card, this made a total screen area of 3840 x 1024 pixels--quite
a sight to see. (Don't try this without a sturdy desk, deep pockets, and a
strong back!)
Once the card and monitor are installed and Colorgraphic's supplied
software is installed on the Windows NT Display control panel, you need to set
the screen resolution. Then, after a reboot, a new control panel called SetArray
appears. It's pretty basic, not as flexible or intuitive as the Mac's Monitors
panel, but you can set how many monitors you have horizontally and vertically.
Four monitors could be 2 x 2 or 1 x 4 after you reboot. However, you can
identify which monitor is which only by experimenting. I had to swap cables
until they appeared 1, 2, 3 on the desk.
But these are minor complaints, things a Mac user migrating to NT will
miss. Anyone who needs multiple monitors will find the Colorgraphic card quite
acceptable.
The four-monitor Colorgraphic card comes with a terminator to use on the
fourth plug if you've attached only three monitors. This is important; without
the terminator, monitor #3 has a noticeable shadow--not surprising, considering
the very high frequencies present. Other than this caution, however, I recommend
the Colorgraphic card highly.
It's interesting how many programs don't behave quite right on multiple
monitors. I'm sure that few testers have two or three monitors to test on, but
that's no excuse for Office 95, which seems to contradict Microsoft's own
programming guidelines. For instance, if you have a Word document window open on
screen three and maximize it, it goes big on screen one. You must manually size
and move the window if you want it somewhere else. And several NT messages also
pop up on monitor #1, no matter which monitor has the program.
This situation reminds me of the early days of the Macintosh, where
programs would do the same sort of things. In that case, as I'm sure will be
true in this one, the cure was time for the developers to realize the problem.
Serial Ports Galore
If you need a lot of serial ports, the classical solution is a multi-port
intelligent serial board, one that has an on-board CPU. DigiBoard, Equinox,
CompuTone, and others make great boards that include NT drivers. They use memory
mapping and perhaps a single interrupt request (IRQ) line to transfer data
between the computer and the outside world. If you need a lot of ports, that's
the way to go: One board can handle 128 or more serial devices. NT sees COM1
through COM128, and the board does the CPU-intensive I/O.
But most of us don't need a roomful of serial devices; we need four or
five: mouse, modem, graphics pad, and maybe a UPS monitoring port. The original
PC supported only two, so additional ones have been tacked on. Each one needs a
separate IRQ, so you need a 16-bit board to have enough IRQs to go around. For
that, I'd recommend a board such as the one from QuickPath Systems. It has four
serial ports, with settable IRQs, so you can connect all your external devices.
It also has two parallel ports, so you can hook up all your printers, too, and
still use only one ISA slot.
On the QuickPath, like most good serial cards, each serial port uses a
16550 UART. This chip has an 8-byte buffer for characters; if you turn it on in
the "Advanced" section of the Port Control Panel (it's the "FIFO
Enabled" check box), you'll lose fewer characters at high speed.
My main complaint about the QuickPath is that you can set its third and
fourth port to high-order IRQs--9 through 15--but not the first two. They can be
set only to IRQs 3 through 7. Most Pentium motherboards have two built-in serial
ports that can use only IRQ 3 or 4, so you may have to turn off two serial
ports, instead of having a total of six.
On the Road Again
Having explored the basics of Windows NT installation fairly completely, I
feel a road trip coming on. I've already visited a few special-effects shops
that use NT, and I'll discuss their work starting next month. Remote-access
software should be mature enough to try pretty soon, and shows like Digital
Hollywood are on the horizon. It's great to have so much to write about!