I had a fun little gig last weekend. One of my business clients just struck out on his own as a Financial Advisor. I’d already helped equip and setup his new office, with great results. But he discovered that he could really use a second display on his desktop. On one, he could keep his e-mail open, and on the other he could have client information, spreadsheets, etc.

His Dell Optiplex GX620 Small Form Factor wasn’t originally spec’d out for dual display support (it just had the on-board Intel video). I had him order an ATI Radeon X600SE low profile PCI-e graphics adapter along with his second 19-inch Dell Ultrasharp Flat Panel Display. He contacted me once everything arrived, and I scheduled a time to visit his office to put it all together. As fate would have it, this past Sunday was the best time for me, otherwise I’d have to put him off another week. Fortunately, his office is very close to my home on the north side of Chicago. So we met up there and I jumped right into the task at hand.

It was a teeny-tiny PCI-e adapter, which was necessary due to the small clearances inside the SFF chassis. It had a single DVI-D output, but came with a Y-Cable which gave me the two DVI connectors necessary to drive both monitors. I could have used the DVI-VGA “Y” cable adapter, but if you can go all digital, why bother with VGA? So I got the adapter into the PCI-e slot and closed up the case. I unboxed his second 19-inch LCD and placed it next to the original one. Next, I connected up all the cabling, doing my best to keep the cable clutter to a minimum.

I switched both displays to their DVI inputs and booted up the PC. Everything fired right up, but I still needed to install the drivers for the new display adapter. That was easy enough, and before you could say “two displays are better than one”, I had my customer zooming around on his dual display desktop.

One of my own personal to-do’s is to upgrade the display adapter on my primary desktop PC at home so I can enjoy a second display. One of these days, I’ll get around to it.