Talking tech since 2003

Recently I bought a second 19″ wide screen monitor to go along with my current 19″ wide screen monitor. They’re both Acer Monitors. However, one is black and one is silver. I originally had the silver and when I went to buy the second one I couldn’t find the silver one anywhere so I ended up having to get a black one. This is the Monitor: Acer AL1916W Series – Note: Make sure you get one with a DVI video input if you have a video card that can support it.

Anyway, now with the new dual monitor setup I wanted to find a way to extend my desktop to other desktop. By extend my desktop I mean instead of just having an extra monitor and being able to drag things over to it; I wanted to extend my taskbar over to the additional monitor. So I looked in the desktop properties (where you change your resolution, etc.) and it had an option to ‘extend desktop’, so I ticked it. It didn’t work…after tinkering around a bit I gave up with that and went to Google and did some searching. After a bit of searching I stumbled across something called UltraMon. This piece of software is exactly what I wanted. Not only does it allow you to extend your taskbar, but you can do so much more. You can create hotkeys for many different functions such as moving one window to the other monitor without dragging it over, centering the mouse in a particular monitor, launch an application or script, and to disable/enable secondary monitors. The feature I use it for mostly is the Smart Taskbar which extends my taskbar. You can have it extend the taskbar and mirror it (so it has all the same windows/programs on it as the main monitor or you can have it act as another taskbar for totally separate windows/programs – that’s what I do. Talk about more screen real estate.

If you have 2 or more monitors I highly recommend this program.

Note: If you have Vista make sure you download the newest version of UltraMon which is currently in Beta but seems to be stable. I have had no issues with it. Any other Windows OS should be fine with the official stable release.

I’m curious, how do you use your dual (or more) monitor setup? Leave a comment!

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