How to connect a second monitor on a computer. PC does not detect second monitor: how to fix? Windows 10 second monitor not working

Working with two and a large number Monitors are very convenient and pleasant, as you get much more space for your tasks, and in games, monitors can be combined for a more immersive effect.

Connecting a second monitor to a computer is simple and quick in 99% of cases. You plug the monitor into a power outlet and then into the computer via the appropriate cable (VGA, DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, Thunderbolt, USB-C) into the appropriate slot and Windows automatically detects the additional monitor. After this, options are available in System Settings to expand, duplicate, or display the image on only one of the monitors. If something goes wrong during this procedure and the computer does not see the second monitor (or third, for example), this instruction will tell you a few points that you need to pay attention to. Perhaps some of the tips will help fix the problem.

The computer does not see the second monitor - how to fix it

The reason why your computer refuses to work with the second monitor may be either a software or hardware problem, and therefore you will have to try different tips one at a time. We recommend starting with the simplest tips that will help you understand whether the second monitor is detected by the system at all. It often happens that Windows sees the second monitor, but it is disabled software. In this case, enabling it will be as simple as changing a few parameters in your computer settings.

If connecting a second monitor to your computer does not give any positive results, try simply rebooting it. After that, move on to the next tips.

Is your monitor turned on?

The question may seem very stupid, but it is still worth paying attention to. Many monitors have two switches - a main power button (usually on the front of the monitor for easy access) and a secondary power switch near the power cable. Make sure both These switches are in the “On” position. The light indication will help you navigate this. Almost all monitors are equipped with some kind of LED to indicate the status of the monitor. It should burn. At this stage, it doesn’t matter what color - you must understand that the power is supplied and it works.

Also pay attention to the monitor's power cable. It should be inserted all the way into the screen's power slot, and there should be no noticeable damage to it. If you see any flaws or damage on the cable, do not under any circumstances try to connect it to the network!

Is the monitor ok?

Make sure the monitor you connect to your computer is working properly. Disconnect the main screen and connect the second one. If the desired result is not achieved, try connecting the monitor using a different connector. Modern monitors have several connection methods (VGA, HDMI, DVI, DisplayPort, etc.), so try them all if you have the appropriate cables. Try connecting it with the same cable as your main one. Connect the screen to another computer. If it doesn’t start there either, then the problem may be hidden in the screen itself.

Is the cable ok?

Check if there is physical damage on your cable. Make sure that the fastening clamps of the cable connectors are tightly tightened (this primarily applies to VGA and DVI cables, which in the vast majority of cases are equipped with tightening screws), and that the connector itself is inserted all the way.

If you do not see any physical damage to the cable, and all the fasteners are securely fastened, you should try using a different cable. Perhaps the problem is hidden in bent connector pins or other hardware problems invisible to the user's eye. Often another cable solves the problem. When connecting the cable (relevant for DVI and VGA cables), be careful. Always connect the correct way, and do not rush or use excessive force if the cable resists.

If you are trying to connect a monitor via cable USB-C standard, you should make sure that this cable supports video signal transmission. Not all USB-C cables are created equal. While they all have the same connector, some only support file transfer and charging, while others can carry video or are Thunderbolt compatible. Your computer must also support USB-C output.

Is the video card/motherboard ok?

Make sure the video output on your motherboard (for computers with integrated graphics) or video card is working. Connect your primary monitor (the one that is likely to work and be recognized by the computer) to the port where you are trying to connect the other monitor. Connecting a second monitor to another computer can also help determine a computer hardware problem.

How do you connect the monitor?

Check if you are connecting your monitor correctly. If your main screen is connected to the video outputs of a discrete video card, the second monitor must also be connected to the second video output. video cards. Connecting to VGA / DVI / HDMI / DiaplayPort / USB-C on the motherboard will not work in this case, since the BIOS motherboard configured to work with external graphics. Moreover, your processor may even physically lack a video core, which will completely negate the functionality of the video outputs on the motherboard. There is no point in trying to connect the monitor to the motherboard.

Does your card support multiple monitors?

Just because there are two or more connection ports on a graphics card does not mean that you can actually connect two or more monitors. Check your motherboard's user manual to make sure it supports multiple monitors. First of all, this advice is relevant for very old or cheap plug-in video cards.

It happens that the video card supports image output only to two monitors, so when a third monitor is connected, nothing happens. I personally encountered this situation when I tried to connect two monitors to an old laptop. One was detected via the HDMI cable, but the second was no longer identified via the analog video output. In this case, you need to come to terms with the physical limitations of your computer's video adapter.

Is the cable connected directly or through an adapter?

Adapters are a very controversial issue. They are used if the video card or monitor does not have the required connector, and changing the cable or screen is not an option. If you are trying to connect a monitor to a video card using an adapter, make sure that the video card supports converters. First of all, this concerns the adapter from digital to analog signal. Modern video cards are not equipped with ports with output analog signal, so conventional adapters from an analog signal do not work. In this case, you need to buy an active adapter with a converter. On older video cards, DVI connectors include a pin for an analog signal, so DVI-VGA conversion is possible using a regular adapter. Newer video cards (Nvidia abandoned the analog signal in the GeForce 10XX on Pascal architecture) do not have the ability to use such adapters.

What about the drivers?

Your system may be running your main monitor via a standard VGA graphics adapter. This is a primitive driver that allows you to render a picture on any video card without drivers. It is capable of transmitting images even through damaged video cards. On some computers, these drivers allow you to display images in sufficiently high resolution, which is why inexperienced users believe that the video driver is installed. In this case, trying to connect a second monitor will end in nothing, since the video card simply does not use its capabilities through the software.

It's also worth noting here that there are times when the second monitor was working, but after updating the driver, the video suddenly stopped working. There may be a bug in the new driver that caused the second monitor to turn off. In this case, roll back the driver to the previous version and see if your problem goes away.

"Gluing" monitors

Check to see if your pair of monitors is running in some advanced mode. AMD has EyeFinity technology, which combines the image from two screens into one large one. In this case, in Windows Settings Instead of two screens, one large wide screen is displayed. Try disabling all these software things, after which the second screen should work.

Unlikely, but worth a try too.

Some argue that different monitor frequencies can cause the second screen to not work. In this case, the monitor itself can be displayed on the screen, but there is no image on it. If you encounter this strange bug, try checking your screen frequency and changing it so that both monitors run at the same frequency.

If you know other methods that can help fix the problem with the second monitor not working, please share them in the comments. Your experience may help some of the readers if we did not mention it in the article.

If you need to connect two monitors to a computer or a second monitor to a laptop, this is usually not difficult at all, except in rare cases (when you have a PC with an integrated video adapter and a single monitor output).

After turning on the computer with two monitors connected to it, they are usually detected automatically by the system after booting. However, it may turn out that when you first load the image, it will not be on the monitor on which it is usually displayed.

After the first launch, all that remains is to configure the operating mode of two monitors, while Windows supports the following modes:

Screen duplication - the same image is displayed on both monitors. IN in this case, if the physical resolution of the monitors is different, there may be problems in the form of blurred images on one of them, since when duplicating the screen, the system sets the same resolution for both monitors (and this cannot be changed).
Displays the image on only one of the monitors.
Expand screens - when choosing this option for operating two monitors, the working Windows table“expands” onto two screens, i.e. on the second monitor there is an extension of the desktop.

Operating modes are configured in the Windows screen settings:

In all cases, if you are having problems with image clarity, make sure that each monitor is set to its physical screen resolution (see,).

Additional information

In conclusion, here are a few additional points that may be useful when connecting two monitors or just for information.

I think we can conclude here. If you have any questions, something is not clear or does not work, leave comments (detailed if possible), I will try to help.

Windows 10 has a number of features that make multitasking easier and allow you to work with multiple windows at the same time.

Snap

Snap allows you to quickly resize a window, which is especially useful when you want to see two windows at once. To do this, drag the desired window left or right until the cursor reaches the edge of the screen, and then release the mouse button. The window will be fixed in place. To undock a window, simply click and drag the window down.

Note: if you have more than one window open, then when you select the second window, it will automatically dock in the free part of the screen and take its place.

Flip

You can use Flip to switch between open windows. To do this, press and hold the key Alt on the keyboard, and without releasing the key, press Tab. Continue pressing the Tab key until the window you want is selected.

Task View

New feature Task View is similar to the Flip function, but it works a little differently. To open Task View, click on the icon in the lower left corner of the screen, in the taskbar. Alternatively, you can press the keyboard shortcut Windows + Tab on the keyboard to bring up Task View. A screen will appear where everyone will be visible open windows, and you can click on any window to select.

Virtual desktops

Instead of keeping all your windows on one desktop, you can move some windows to a virtual desktop. This new feature in Windows 10, which was not present in previous versions, and it is especially useful for managing many windows at once. To create a new desktop, open Task View and then select Create desktop in the lower right corner.

Once you have created multiple desktops, you can use Task View to switch between them. You can also move windows between desktops. To do this, open Task View, then click and drag the window to the desired desktop.

To close the virtual desktop, open and click on X in the upper right corner of the desktop you want to close.

Hide/show desktop

If you have a lot of windows open, it may be difficult to see your desktop. In this case, you can click on the narrow button on the right edge of the taskbar. This will minimize all open windows. You can click it again to restore minimized windows.

To receive best experience and productivity improvements, users use a combination of two or even more monitors. This doesn't mean you need to buy another computer or laptop to use two monitors.

If your video card supports multiple connection ports, then you can easily connect multiple monitors to it. Based on this, the number of monitors you can connect to your PC depends on the number of ports on your graphics card.

You can find various ports on a graphics card, such as VGA, DVI, HDMI, and Displayport. These days, HDMI and Displayport are the most popular connection interfaces. VGA and DVI-I (not DVI-D), in turn, are practically no longer used (connecting a modern video card to a VGA monitor is still incredibly problematic).

Most widespread The connection interface is HDMI, which provides users with access to the highest resolutions available at the moment. Plus, HDMI can also carry the signal from the sound card.

In addition to different connection interfaces for transmitting video signals from the video card to the monitor, there are two different types video cards: integrated and discrete (PCIe). What is the difference between these two types of video cards?

The integrated video card is built into the motherboard, and the PCIe video card is connected to the PCIe slot of the PC motherboard. If you play video games, exercise graphic design or video editing, we recommend that you use discrete video card, since it is designed for such tasks and is much more productive.

Sometimes, you will need to connect a second monitor to your machine. This procedure is quite simple: we take a cable with the desired connection interface, for example, HDMI, connect one end to the connector on the video card, and the other to the connector on the monitor. That's all.

However, sometimes things don't go so smoothly, and your computer, for some reason, cannot detect the second monitor. What is the reason behind this trouble? So, there are many reasons: cable problems, incompatible drivers, configuration problems with the user’s computer, etc.

In this article, we will look at 10 various methods, which we hope can help you with the problem of detecting a connected monitor.

If you have correctly connected the monitor to your video card, but nothing is displayed on it, then you can try changing the projection mode. The problem could simply be because your graphics card didn't know what to do with the second monitor you connected. Now we will show you how to change the projection mode on Windows 10. Although, the same can be done on operating systems such as Windows 8 and Windows 8.1.

Press the key combination on your keyboard Windows+P.
Then you will see a menu for selecting a projection mode, which will contain four settings. Select the setting according to your preferences and click on it.

Well, has the second monitor finally come to life? If not, then that was not the issue and we move on.

IN operating system Windows (as, indeed, in any other OS) sometimes various bugs and errors arise that prevent it from working correctly, and, as a result, prevent the user from using the functionality of the OS.

Try rebooting your machine to fix it possible problem. There is a possibility that the problem is on the side of your OS, which stubbornly does not want to detect the connection of another monitor in the available devices. After rebooting, try the method described above again.

Method #3 Disconnecting the computer, monitors and cables

Ok, in the previous method we tried to simply restart the computer to get rid of a possible “jamb” of Windows 10/8.1/8. However, the problem may not be at the level software, but at the hardware level.

Try turning off your computer completely, disconnect all monitors from it, disconnect all cables from them. Also remember to unplug your two monitors. Wait a couple of minutes, and then reconnect all equipment.

Perhaps there was some kind of conflict in the connected hardware of your computer and the second monitor refused to be detected by the system. This method helps some users on the network (at least some of them claim so). Plus, there is simply no risk when performing, say, this trick. So why not try it.

Method No. 4 Reconnecting the video adapter (video card)

Some users claim that simply reconnecting the video card through the Device Manager system utility helped them solve the problem of the second monitor not displaying.

This is done very simply and now we will show you how to do it:

Right-click on Start and select Device Manager.
You will see a list of equipment that is installed and running on your system. Find the "Video Adapters" section.
Find the name of your video card in the list and right-click on it.
Select Disconnect Device.
Then right-click on the driver for your video card again and select “Enable device.”
Test your second monitor again.

Perhaps your second monitor was diligently not being detected due to the fact that the driver for your video card began to malfunction for some reason. This simple procedure of reactivating the device can often correct the situation.

Method #5 Reinstalling monitors

Ok, if re-enabling your video adapter did not help fix the situation, then let's try to reinstall the monitors themselves that are currently connected to your system. Go to the system utility Task Manager again and follow these steps:

When you are in front of the list of installed equipment, find the “Monitors” section.
Open this section and find your monitor in the list. Right-click on it and select “Remove device.”
After your monitor goes dark, restart your computer and connect a second monitor to it if it wasn't already connected to system unit, and then the main monitor.
Then check if your second monitor is displayed in conjunction with the main one.

Method No. 6 Roll back the driver for the video card to the previous version

Perhaps the problem with detecting the second monitor lies in the driver for the video card that is currently installed on your system. To resolve this issue, you can try rolling back the video driver to previous version. This is done, again, through the Device Manager.

Go to Device Manager, go to the Video Adapters section and find your video card.
Right-click on it and select Properties.
Go to the "Driver" tab.
Click on the "Roll Back" button.

Once the driver for your computer has rolled back, try connecting two monitors to it again. If this time everything went well and you did accomplish your plan, then the problem was definitely the driver for the video card.

Method #7 Changing the refresh rate

In this method, we will now try to change the refresh rate on your monitor, since it may be the cause of problems when connecting a second monitor. For example, you could set the refresh rate on your main monitor to 75Hz, while both additional monitor, maximum frequency update is 59-60 Hertz.

Click on your keyboard Windows+I to go to system settings.
Go to the "System" section.
Then select the "Display" tab.
Scroll down to the very bottom of the screen settings window and click on the “Graphics adapter properties” link.
Go to the “Monitor” tab.
Click on the drop-down menu and select the correct refresh rate for your monitor, for example 60 Hz.
Apply the changes.

After changing the refresh rate, try connecting a second monitor and see if anything changes. You can also try setting something in the projection settings that we mentioned in the very first point.

Method #8 Tricks for laptop owners

If you are trying to connect a second monitor to a laptop, then we can recommend you to perform a couple of tricks that may help when connecting a second monitor:

Try closing your laptop while the monitor is connected (this will make the laptop display temporarily disabled). The second monitor should now be marked as the main monitor. As soon as you open the laptop, both displays should start working at once.
Try putting your computer into sleep mode while a second monitor is connected to your computer, and then waking it up.

Method #9 Activating Multiple Displays

If you are an Nvidia graphics card user, then you can try enabling the multiple display option in the Nvidia Control Panel.

Right-click on the Desktop and select Nvidia Control Panel.

Today, users have a large selection of PC monitors. You will not surprise anyone with the large screen size and high-quality characteristics. But, nevertheless, if this is not enough, and it is not practical to install an even larger screen, you can connect another monitor. Once you choose the right monitor, it's quite simple. When choosing, you must be guided by the availability of quality characteristics that meet modern standards.

PC connection

You need to make sure that the monitor you choose meets the standards. By connecting both monitors, you can use different plug connectors. It is recommended to install the main screen that has the best characteristics. It would be advisable to purchase another monitor identical to the one you already have.

The first step is to connect both monitors to your PC with Windows 10, using the menu items in which the monitor settings are made. Having entered the “Screen Resolution” option, you need to click “Find”, and then start the process of detecting the second screen with the corresponding button. After this, it is necessary for Windows 10 to determine the location of the second monitor. To do this, move the screen blue, hovering the cursor over it in the direction you need. Then, by clicking on it, through the settings menu, enter the necessary parameters, brightness, resolution, etc.

Features of connecting to a laptop

Cable connectors in laptops usually come in two types: HDMI and VGA. It is recommended to use HDMI as it provides picture best characteristics. In order to correctly, after connecting the cable, you need to go to the settings menu, as described above. It is necessary to specify the position of the screens using an extension; There is no need to use the duplication operation. Then use your mouse to move the screens. Next, as usual, configure the parameters by setting maximum resolution etc.