Dual screen dilemma

Now I have room on my desk and have installed a nebula tv card into my compy, I just don't have enough room on my 17" monitor when doing a few things at once. So I was thinking, perhaps a 15" monitor to sit beside me to have the tv or irc or messenger etc on. I don't really want a larger monitor as that would defeat the point. Would my 6800gt do this well enough, whilst gaming, or should i get a pci gfx card for the smaller monitor? Ay other good ideas? Where can I get a cheapish 15" monitor to do this job? What software allows for decent screen spanning? Help?!?

Menthel, you might not like to know this but when I had a dual monitor set-up most games would make the others go blank... this may have been the due to the hardware I was using. But in general it makes the other display useless.

Someone else may be able to back-up for disprove my point.

Hmm. Some of the Scan lot were saying that they play wow and cs whilst keeping an eye on the forums etc on theirs. Lets wait and see! Perhaps we all may benefit. ;)

I play css on one monitor, and watch msn, winamp, and what ever i can fill my second with...

You just cant click on much over on the other.... still have to alt-tab, but at least you can see it..

Do you use any specific software, or just the ati drivers from your gfx card?

Just the ATI Drivers...

Ohh that might be it!!

ATI, they have it set up as 2 different drivers (one for each display) where Nvidia have it set up as one... That could be why kirkabus has problems (assuming he is Nvidia)...

Something like that... I think :S

Looks like ultramon would be useful.

I normally run CS in a window on one screen - as it has a hissy fit running fullscreen in dual mode... My nVidia set up is as 2 screens spanned horizontally...

Ultramon is more then usefull for a dual screen setup, its essential. Without it you get much less out of the second monitor.

Your graphics card will manage fine though, its just some 2D stuff, nice and easy. Only thing I can think of is it might increase you're memory footprint in the card memory or your ram.

I have 2gb, so my system memory should be fine! Off to try and find a cheap, half decent 15" then.