Full Dual Monitor Support (WinXP on OSX)

I would like to be able to use one Windows XP VM across two monitors from within OS X. This is the critical thing holding me back from spending the $50 and switching from boot camp.

 

Could you please describe in more details why do you need that. There are several ways we can achieve this feature, and usage details are very important here. Will it be ok if guest system will use both of your monitors, but will think that it's the only one, or you want your guest system to "see" 2 different monitors?

 

Whatever you do, please dont remove the way the dual monitor works in Beta 4 because its fantastic!! (i.e. with host OS on main screen and guest OS in full screen on auxillary screen)

 

To me, it wouldn't make any difference in how I'd use the system whether the guest OS saw my two monitors as one large screen or as two, except for the possibility that apps that try to center their window would wind up with them lapping between the two displays.

So perhaps treating them as two would be best.

 

This is something I'd very much like as well. I'd like to have winXP windows open in two different mac monitors so that I have a board layout in one window and a schematic on another.

It seems to me the most practical way of doing it is to add the ability to open a second window for my virtual machine that the OS would percieve as a second monitor.

Conceivably one could also just make it so you could resize the window much larger. This is not as good a solution because it'll make wondows maximizing in winXP work in an unintuitive way. There is also the potential for missing pieces of the "screen" when monitors are of different sizes.

 

I'll nth this analysis, seems like having two separate windows that are individually full-screenable that show up as two separate monitors to the guest solves the problem while creating the least new ones.

 

I'll put my vote in for this too. I would like a guest os that has two windows which both can be made full screen on separate monitors. I just want a dual-monitor setup for the guest os (windows) just like you can do natively.

 

I vote for dual-monitor support in Windows too...

For me, inside Windows XP virtual machine, if you have two monitors hooked to the mac, it should see two virtual monitors in the Display Properties/Settings control panel in Windows.

Then you could tell Win to extend your desktop to a monitor (or not), just as if it was a PC with 2 physical monitors.

Right now, I can really only place Parallels on either my MBP display or the external monitor (which is different size/resolution), but not both. I can stretch the window across both monitors, but this is lame--crops part off the smaller monitor, doesn't line up, etc.

How hard is this to implement?

 

Dual Monitors

me too! How it works in XP is you right click desktop>properties>settings> and there should be 2 monitors there.

Thanks!

 

Yes, that's what I meant with this post elsewhere!

I want to run a Powerpoint presentation, (actually MediaShout Presentation) using PD. Using MBP I want to set up the external display, which is a standard computer monitor or a large screen projector. I want Powerpoint or MediaShout to show the presentation on the second display, while I control the software using my MBP. This is the standard proceedure on a PC or a Mac for presentations. Using MediaShout in PD would be heaven on earth for a lot of people. (www.mediashout.com)

My problem is that I cannot get a second display to show up in the Display control panel in XP. The second display works fine in that I can drag PD to it and use it, but it will not appear as a second display for presentations or show up in the Display control panel.

Another thing that I would like to do is have the video driver in PD support the SVideo and RCA video adapter for the MBP.

Are these things already supported? I cannot find any info about it in the Manual or in these forums.

I hope this makes sense. I'm not very versed in the terminology.

 

This would be great for SongBeamer also (www.songbeamer.com) and even Powerpoint. Any program that will use a second display if it is there.

People with the MacBook will want it to act like a PC laptop. When I plug in a second monitor, let me use it.

I think you need to have an option so that if I have two monitors I could
1) use one for OSX and one for my VM
2) use both in the VM

 

Take a look at http://www.maxivista.com.

This is a virtual display adapter that redirects the output over a network to another PC. This could of course be another instance of a VM. I've used Maxivista to get a 2nd monitor in VMware and it did the trick, so I guess it will work with Parallels, too.

BTW: I can highly recommend SongBeamer.

 

This is exactly what I need as well. Would love to hear if there are any plans to implement this.

 

Please help!

The entirety of the reason why I bought PD was to be able to run windows with this setup (guess the joke's on me)! Please please please get full dual monitor support somehow!

 

Dual Monitor Support

I have a MacBook Pro and I am running XP on PD. One of the applications I am using is MediaShout. It is a Praise and Worship Software for XP the requires two monitors.

Can you tell me if this feature will be available soon?

 

Lots of us using MediaShout...

There seems to be a large (or at least medium) number of us using MediaShout that need dual-monitor support. My workaround so far has been that I've been forced to use BootCamp to get the second monitor working...but I'm not happy about it! I'd much rather use PD! Either that or Apple needs to develop something like Keynote for churches. Now wouldn't THAT be awesome!?

 

I too purchase Parallels assuming that it would support dual monitors for WinXP the way XP natively supports it.

It is a great benefit with all Adobe software and hundreds of others, where you can have a work space monitor, and a tools monitor.

Any word on if and/or when this may be added?

 

Well, doesn't look like this made it into the update (sigh)

 

... but is it coming in the near future?

thanks,
phil

 

Why not run XP natively through BootCamp in-between?

Seeing how much some people want their Mac loaded with Parallels and a XP VM act purely as a XP machine, I start wondering if some do really have a use for Mac OS X beside running XP?

I though have to agree that the more complete the virtual hardware support is, the better it is for all those small or large cases where you really need it. But really, really, reading some posts in these forums, I wonder if some people are not dreaming a bit too much and might have a better productivity through BootCamp.

Take the case of a business presentation using a tool with no equivalent in the Mac OS X world. Wouldn't it be reasonable to reboot the machine to native XP just for the duration of such a task? Sure it would be nicer if that reboot was not even needed. And it will probably come true in some future. But in between, is it really reasonable to expect a virtualization product such Parallels Desktop for Mac to support multi-physical screens configurations from day one? ;-)