Notes

[the Notes section is intended to post things that happened during the day, mostly tech related. It’s not fully informative neither an tutorial, just daily things]

I have an old crt monitor unused for long time and sitting next to my desk. Since I love using using two monitor layout. Why not put a third in place (2 outside & 1 laptop) ? Explaining in one line (using xrandr) I would like to use VGA and HDMI output.

	xrandr --output LVDS1 --mode 1366x768 --above HDMI1
	xrandr --output LVDS1 --mode 1366x768 --above HDMI1 --left-of VGA1

So I tried, but…

And discovered that my computer doesn’t support connect at same time the VGA and HDMI cables due mechanical restrictions. I consider this a big design failure but checking the next steps I found that even connecting it, my layout would probably not work.

This ASUS notebook has 2 video cards:

• GeForce 630M
• onboard Intel HD4000 (Ivy Bridge)

GeForce 630M seems not support more than two monitors and HD4000 according to Wikpedia:

“(…) HD4000 GPUs in Ivy Bridge CPUs are advertised as supporting three active monitors, but many users have found that this does not work for them due to the chipsets only supporting two active monitors in many common configurations. The reason for this is that the chipsets only include two phase-locked loops (PLLs); a PLL generates a pixel clock at a certain frequency which is used to sync the timings of data being transferred between the GPU and displays.”