Primary Monitor switches to secondary monitor

HI everyone,


I'm having an issue with my displaying settings and I'm hoping someone here can help me to solve this.

I recently had an older HP Pavilion Media Center m7760n Desktop PC rebuilt. The old power supply fried the motherboard so I need to get a new power supply and motherboard. Here are my current specs.

Mainboard : Asus P5QPL-VM EPU
Chipset : Intel G41
Processor : Intel Core 2 Duo E6420 @ 2133 MHz
Physical Memory : 2048 MB (2 x 1024 DDR2-SDRAM )
Video Card : Intel(R) G41 Express Chipset (Microsoft Corporation - WDDM 1.1)
Hard Disk : WDC (1000 GB)
Hard Disk : WDC (250 GB)
DVD-Rom Drive : TSSTcorp CD/DVDW TS-H653L ATA Device
Monitor Type : Hewlett Packard HP w22 - 22 inches
Monitor Type : Samsung SyncMaster - 15 inches
Network Card : AR8121/AR8113/AR8114 PCIe Ethernet Controller
Network Card : AR5006X 802.11a/b/g Wireless Network Adapter
Operating System : Windows 7 Ultimate Professional 6.01.7600
DirectX : Version 11.00
Windows Performance Index : 2.9


As you can see from above, the "video card" is actually integrated into the motherboard.

The computer works perfectly except for one major problem. I have 2 monitors, one is 22" with 1680 x 1050 resolution and the other is a 15" monitor with 1024 x 768 resolution. At the back of my computer I have a VGA port and a DVI port. The 15" is connected to the VGA port and the 22" is connected to the DVI port.

When first starting the computer, the 15" monitor was recognized as the primary monitor while the 22" was recognized as the secondary monitor. No problem. I simply went to the display settings and set the 22" to be the primary monitor and the 15" to be the secondary monitor. Unfortunately, this setting seems to reset as soon as I reboot the computer. The 15" is always set as the primary monitor on start up, forcing me to set the proper settings all over again. What's worse is that even after I have set the proper settings, they sometimes revert back when using Media Center or other programs. Worse yet, sometimes the monitors both go completely black ... as if the monitor settings were about to switch but got locked up some how.

I'm assuming that perhaps the on board video has a primary port (VGA) and a secondary port (DVI) but even still, shouldn't Windows 7 be able to over-ride this and save these settings so that the monitor settings remain the same during startup and regular usage?


Any insight into this problem is greatly appreciated!

Thanks.

I am having the exact same issue. Did you ever fix this?
I just posted a similar question in this thread: http://www.sevenforums.com/graphic-cards/169423-primary-monitor-keeps-changing.htm

Hey there Fireball8931,


I never did find an exact fix for the problem but I did find a very useful work around to the problem. It actually was quite simple. For me it involved 2 steps but for you it may only require one.

First off, as I mentioned in my original post, my display settings would never save after restarting the computer. The VGA connection connected to my 15" monitor would always be recognized as the primary display while my DVI connection connected to my 22" monitor would always be recognized as the secondary monitor. To fix this problem I scooped up UltraMon.

UltraMon is a multiple monitor utility that allows you to define multiple monitor profiles amongst other things. For example, you may want to change resolution on a certain monitor for a certain task ... having a profile for this makes it simple to switch between this profile and any other defined profiles. Better yet, you can define a default profile that will load up as soon as UltraMon initially starts. So in my case, I simply defined my default profile (22" as primary and 15" as secondary) and set UltraMon to automatically launch on startup. Nice! ... but still not perfect.

The second part of the problem that I needed to solve was that I have two account on my windows 7 computer. The first is an administrative account and the second is a non-password protected user account. So of course, before UltraMon could ever launch I would first need to select which account to use ... which would mean that I would have to sign in from my 15" screen and then turn it off and turn on my 22" screen and wait for UltraMon to start up. What a hassle. What I found was that you can set Windows 7 to automatically sign in to an account (password protected or non-password protected) on startup. You'll have to do some digging to find this info though ... I don't quite remember how to do this at the moment but I do remember that it was super simple.

So with UltraMon set and with Windows 7 set to automatically log in to my default windows account, I was finally set! Now I can power up my computer and simply wait for it to automatically log into my account and then wait as UltraMon launches and loads my default profile.

Hope this helps.