W7 running dual cards

[VaughnStrick]

OK guys and gals, I give up and am asking for help. I have been running 2 ATI Radon 1300 dual port cards in my XP Pro machine for at least 2 years. I am using both cards to run 4 monitors. I bought a new machine with Vista Business and was never able to get it to run both cards, so I stuck with XP. Now I have upgraded the Vista machine to W7 and it still will not see both cards, so again I am stuck on my XP machine. I have spent prob 50-60 hours working on this problem to no avail.
All that having been said, I NEED to move to the newer faster computer, but I am not willing to go back to only two monitors. Thus, I need some help, or some options. If there is a way to get both of the cards I have running, I would love to know it. However, if there is not I am willing to buy new cards.

New Machine:
Acer Vertion M460
Core 2 Duo E7500
2 Gig Ram
Chip Set Intel 946GZ + ICH7DH

My current cards are both ATI 1300s One is PCI and the other is PCI Express

Anyone got any ideas?

Thanks.

 

[torrentg]

Hi.

In my opinion, you'd be better off upgrading to the HD line of cards from ATI.

If you want to install drivers for your current cards - download and extract this
to C:\ATI

Then in device manager, for each card, do the following:

Right click on it. Update driver software. Browse my computer. Let me pick. Have disk. Browse. Now find and double click on the extracted .inf. Hit ok. Hit next and it will install.

 

[VaughnStrick]

Thanks for the reply. However, the root of my problem is that I can't see both cards in device manager. Only one will show up at a time. On my XP machine I actually see 4 display adapters in the device manager, one for each active port. Anyone out there running dual cards under W7?

 

[torrentg]

Millions of people are running dual cards in Win 7. Or at least hundreds of thousands.

You could try to see if you have the latest chipset drivers installed.

 

[VaughnStrick]

so you think this might be a motherboard driver problem?

 

[VaughnStrick]

After doing some more research, it is clear that even if I get my current cards running in my W7 machine, their latest driver will not support the W7 features that I would like to use. As such, I am now looking for advice on which cards to buy. Does anyone know of a single card that will support 4 monitors and W7? If not, I am more than willing to buy 2 ATI HD cards, but which ones. First off I have the following slots available:

1 PCI Express x16
1 PCI Express x1
2 PCI v2.3

I know I want at least one card for the x16 slot, but what other form factor do I buy? Do I want 2 cards of the same model? I am a developer, not a gamer so how much card do I buy? Thanks for the advice, and here's hoping everyone had a happy turkey day.