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I'm looking for a command line tool for setting up multiple monitors.

I'm deploying a Windows Vista image to numerous machines using WDS. When syspreped the dual monitor setup are stripped from the image. I've compensatetd for this in the past using a vbscript that ran at the end of install that would edit registry keys to set up the monitors exactly as they are on the base image.

We've recently purchased several new machines that have different graphics cards and different resolution monitors (management is insisting on using widescreens on some of the machines).

I'd like to keep the deployment fully automated and not have to hunt down the new registry entries and develop a new script for every new hardware setup. Are there any command line utilities that are able to set up multiple monitors with potentially different resolutions on each screen?

voretaq7
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Eric Jensema
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2 Answers2

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ResSwitch is a utility that will let you change the resolution of multiple monitors from a script. Its a command line tool that you send the resolution, colour depth and refresh rate - e.g

resswitch.exe 800 600 32 60

You can use the device switch to specify which device (monitor) the command applies to, specifying the name of the device. So say for 4 monitors you'd probably be best creating a batch file with 4 commands in.

To get the names of the devices you can use ResCopy, also included in that zip file to display them.

squillman
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Sam Cogan
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  • I tried using ResSwitch, and it does part of what I've been looking for, which is change the resolution. The problem is ResSwitch seems to be lacking a way to set the second monitor as an extended monitor. – Eric Jensema Jun 23 '09 at 14:22
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If you've got different graphics cards in different machines and then different monitors on those varying ports I don't see how you could possibly automate it.

My experience of modern multi-monitor setups is that a lot of it runs on auto-detection, ie. if nothing is plugged in to the DVI port but there is on the VGA it will run single head on VGA. Then where one card has VGA as port 0 another may have it as port 1, thus which is to be left and which is right?

Whatever you automate would likely be wiped out on first boot anyway I would expect.

Joel Mansford
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