How To Set Up Dual Monitors On Windows 11

**Setting Up Dual Monitors: A Step-by-Step Guide**

**Introduction**

Dual monitors can significantly enhance your productivity by providing more screen real estate, allowing you to multitask efficiently. However, setting them up correctly can be a bit tricky if you're new to this. In this guide, we'll walk through the process of setting up dual monitors on Windows 11, addressing common issues like transferring folders between monitors and customizing your display settings.

**Hardware Requirements**

Before diving into software settings, ensure your system is equipped to handle dual monitors:

- **Graphics Card:** Check if your graphics card supports dual monitors. Common ports include HDMI, DisplayPort (DP), DVI, and sometimes even onboard display ports on the motherboard.

- **Cables and Ports:** Use compatible cables like HDMI or DP to connect your monitors. Extension cables can also be helpful if needed.

**Monitor Setup**

1. **Connecting Your Monitors:**

- Plug one monitor into the graphics card using an available port (HDMI, DP, DVI).

- If using an onboard display, use a compatible port on the motherboard (e.g., HDMI or DisplayPort).

2. **Checking Monitor Compatibility:**

- Ensure your monitors are compatible with the chosen ports and cables.

**Adjusting Display Settings**

1. **Identifying Monitors:**

- Right-click on your desktop and select "Display Settings."

- In the settings, you'll see identifiers for each monitor (e.g., Monitor 1 and Monitor 2).

2. **Setting Up Your Main Monitor:**

- Choose one monitor as your primary display. Drag this monitor to the desired position (left or right) using the drag-and-drop feature in Display Settings.

3. **Extending Your Desktop:**

- Ensure "Extend these displays" is selected so windows can span both monitors.

4. **Arranging Monitors:**

- Click and drag the monitor icons under "Drag displays to rearrange them" to position your monitors correctly on the virtual desktop grid.

5. **Applying Changes:**

- After arranging, click "Apply" to save your settings.

**Advanced Display Configurations**

1. **Refresh Rate Optimization:**

- In the same Display Settings menu, adjust the refresh rate for each monitor (e.g., set both monitors to 144Hz if supported).

2. **Disabling Snap Assist:**

- To avoid issues with window snapping between monitors, disable this feature:

- Go to "System" > "Multitasking."

- Uncheck "Snap assist" or relevant options.

**Customizing the Taskbar**

- **Taskbar Options:**

- Right-click on the taskbar and select "Taskbar settings."

- Adjust settings like hiding the taskbar, showing it only on one monitor, or customizing its alignment (left, center, or right).

- **Removing Items:**

- Remove unwanted items from the taskbar for a cleaner interface.

**Final Touches**

1. **Wallpaper Setup:**

- Extend your wallpaper across both monitors using tools like Wallpaper Engine on Steam.

2. **Personalization:**

- Customize your display further by adjusting colors, themes, and other personal preferences in the "Personalize" settings.

3. **Testing Your Setup:**

- Ensure folders and windows can smoothly transition between monitors.

**Conclusion**

Setting up dual monitors offers numerous benefits for productivity and multitasking. By following these steps, you can optimize your workspace to suit your needs. Remember, practice and experimentation may be necessary to achieve the perfect setup. For more detailed assistance, consider reaching out to professionals or referring to online communities. Thank you for watching, and we look forward to seeing you in our next video!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat you guys got another video here for you now setting up your monitors is pretty straightforward but if you've never used dual monitors before it can be a little bit tricky and someone emailed me and said he's got a dual monitor set up and he can't seem to put folders between the two monitors so i thought make a video showing you how to do it so first off if you are going to be setting up dual monitors you want to make sure that your graphics card supports dual monitors you can see here we've got two hdmi ports here we also have two dp ports and this is a display ports and we also have a dvi port here as well we can use any of these ports to plug into our monitor to get a display onto it from this graphics card now if you don't have a graphics card and you're using an onboard display you could use one of the display ports on the back of the motherboard you can see here we have hdmi and we have a display port up the top there so depending on which one of these you want to use you can plug that into a monitor and again you would then get display on that monitor now once we've worked out we can use either of these to get display on our monitors we then need to obviously check the monitor to make sure it's compatible with either the uh hdmi or display port or dvi you can also use little extension like these to get a display from and these will give us hdmi as you can see here so whatever way you want to try to get display once you've worked out you've got the right cable and the right display port we can now go over to the pc now whatever the complaints the guy said he had was he can't transfer a folder or any sort of object between the two monitors and he says when he goes to go through the middle it won't go through and he said something's wrong so i said to him okay well i'll show you how to do it it's pretty straightforward you're probably missing something he said he has to go off to the right of the screen to get access to the other monitor and this is a common problem that a lot of people have when they're not used to using dual monitors it's pretty straightforward and easy to fix and i'll show you how to do it in this video so you can see here we're also getting at the snap-on feature here coming up on the screen which is not a good thing to have on dual uh displays so let me close this off and uh right click on the desktop here and go to display settings once you're inside the display settings here depending on how many monitors you've got i've got two here and you can see it says one and two we can push the identifier and it will tell me which monitor is uh one and which one is two and i want to use this number one as my main display so if that is the case i want this onto the right hand side here also having extend these displays is a setting that i'm going to be using but there is some other ones on here as well so now we know number one is going to be our main monitor that i want to use all you need to do here is grab one of these monitors it's not very clear i know and a lot of people miss this feature where it says drag displays to rearrange them you just grab it and drag it over to the right and voila it's now in the position where it should be and once we've got our monitors in the correct position we can click on the apply here and it will then apply these settings and once you've done this you should be able to transfer these between the two monitors the way you couldn't do before and the reason for this is because we've now got them in the right order and a lot of people miss this feature here they don't read the text here and it says dragon displays to arrange them unfortunately not everyone is familiar with dual monitor setup but it is pretty easy to do but i wanted to make this video because i hadn't covered it so i thought might as well do it next we're going to go for the advanced display here and because this monitor supports 144 hertz i want to make sure that we're choosing the right refresh rate which is 144 hertz i need to do this on both of my monitors because they're both identical and they will support 144 hertz and now we've got 144 hertz running on both of these monitors which is the optimal setting for them so now we've got that sorted out you've got some other multi-display options available here if you want to mess around with these but i just generally leave these as is and again once we've got this sorted out we've got the resolution here which is all set to how i like it and these are 1080p monitors but if you've got a different resolution you can change them there once this is done we can move on to the next step which is disabling the multitasking feature which is the snap feature in windows 10 and windows 11 i don't use this with a dual monitor setup it just gets really finicky and it doesn't like it so i just disable the snap feature inside windows and that's how you can disable it it's in system and it's in multitasking and you can see now we're not having it trying to snap all the time to the screen every time i go to transfer it to another window so i disable that feature you can leave it on if you wish also there's some other features on here which you can mess around with but i'm going to leave this as is and click the back button here once we're back here we can now make some other changes to the taskbar if you want to display the taskbar on only one monitor you can right click and go to task file settings like so or you can go back to the area where it says personalized and come down to where it says taskbar click on this one here and now you've got some options which you can remove items from the taskbar and also you can go to taskbar behaviors inside windows 11 that is and again we can go down here and we can make some changes so here we can automatically hide the taskbar we can also show my taskbar on all displays you can remove this and it will remove the taskbar from the second one if you want to and whatever it is you want to set yours up as and there's also a little drop down here which means you can make further changes to your taskbar depending on what you want to set it to i'm pretty happy with the way it is and that's the way i like to normally leave mine but if you want to make other changes you can do and this is where you would make changes to the behavior of your taskbar here you can change the taskbar alignment as well to either left or center on windows 11 on windows 10 you can put it at the top or on the side or wherever it is you want to position your taskbar other than that that is the settings here i'm just going to remove some of these that i don't use and we're pretty much good to go from here and that is the taskbar setup and that is pretty much it it's a basic video on how to set up dual monitors on windows 11 but if you're on windows 10 it's the same sort of principle and pretty much the same for other versions of windows now we need to do is download your wallpaper if you want to extend that across both of the monitors you can do that i find wallpaper engine on steam is probably your best bet for that because people have created those already anyway but that said i hope this one's been some sort of used year i hope this resolves your problem my name has been brian from brighttech computers dot co dot uk i just want to say a quick shout out to all my tier 2 supporters who have joined my youtube members group i really do appreciate the support and your names are rolling up on the screen right now and i shall see you again for another video real soon thanks again for watching bye for now do youwhat you guys got another video here for you now setting up your monitors is pretty straightforward but if you've never used dual monitors before it can be a little bit tricky and someone emailed me and said he's got a dual monitor set up and he can't seem to put folders between the two monitors so i thought make a video showing you how to do it so first off if you are going to be setting up dual monitors you want to make sure that your graphics card supports dual monitors you can see here we've got two hdmi ports here we also have two dp ports and this is a display ports and we also have a dvi port here as well we can use any of these ports to plug into our monitor to get a display onto it from this graphics card now if you don't have a graphics card and you're using an onboard display you could use one of the display ports on the back of the motherboard you can see here we have hdmi and we have a display port up the top there so depending on which one of these you want to use you can plug that into a monitor and again you would then get display on that monitor now once we've worked out we can use either of these to get display on our monitors we then need to obviously check the monitor to make sure it's compatible with either the uh hdmi or display port or dvi you can also use little extension like these to get a display from and these will give us hdmi as you can see here so whatever way you want to try to get display once you've worked out you've got the right cable and the right display port we can now go over to the pc now whatever the complaints the guy said he had was he can't transfer a folder or any sort of object between the two monitors and he says when he goes to go through the middle it won't go through and he said something's wrong so i said to him okay well i'll show you how to do it it's pretty straightforward you're probably missing something he said he has to go off to the right of the screen to get access to the other monitor and this is a common problem that a lot of people have when they're not used to using dual monitors it's pretty straightforward and easy to fix and i'll show you how to do it in this video so you can see here we're also getting at the snap-on feature here coming up on the screen which is not a good thing to have on dual uh displays so let me close this off and uh right click on the desktop here and go to display settings once you're inside the display settings here depending on how many monitors you've got i've got two here and you can see it says one and two we can push the identifier and it will tell me which monitor is uh one and which one is two and i want to use this number one as my main display so if that is the case i want this onto the right hand side here also having extend these displays is a setting that i'm going to be using but there is some other ones on here as well so now we know number one is going to be our main monitor that i want to use all you need to do here is grab one of these monitors it's not very clear i know and a lot of people miss this feature where it says drag displays to rearrange them you just grab it and drag it over to the right and voila it's now in the position where it should be and once we've got our monitors in the correct position we can click on the apply here and it will then apply these settings and once you've done this you should be able to transfer these between the two monitors the way you couldn't do before and the reason for this is because we've now got them in the right order and a lot of people miss this feature here they don't read the text here and it says dragon displays to arrange them unfortunately not everyone is familiar with dual monitor setup but it is pretty easy to do but i wanted to make this video because i hadn't covered it so i thought might as well do it next we're going to go for the advanced display here and because this monitor supports 144 hertz i want to make sure that we're choosing the right refresh rate which is 144 hertz i need to do this on both of my monitors because they're both identical and they will support 144 hertz and now we've got 144 hertz running on both of these monitors which is the optimal setting for them so now we've got that sorted out you've got some other multi-display options available here if you want to mess around with these but i just generally leave these as is and again once we've got this sorted out we've got the resolution here which is all set to how i like it and these are 1080p monitors but if you've got a different resolution you can change them there once this is done we can move on to the next step which is disabling the multitasking feature which is the snap feature in windows 10 and windows 11 i don't use this with a dual monitor setup it just gets really finicky and it doesn't like it so i just disable the snap feature inside windows and that's how you can disable it it's in system and it's in multitasking and you can see now we're not having it trying to snap all the time to the screen every time i go to transfer it to another window so i disable that feature you can leave it on if you wish also there's some other features on here which you can mess around with but i'm going to leave this as is and click the back button here once we're back here we can now make some other changes to the taskbar if you want to display the taskbar on only one monitor you can right click and go to task file settings like so or you can go back to the area where it says personalized and come down to where it says taskbar click on this one here and now you've got some options which you can remove items from the taskbar and also you can go to taskbar behaviors inside windows 11 that is and again we can go down here and we can make some changes so here we can automatically hide the taskbar we can also show my taskbar on all displays you can remove this and it will remove the taskbar from the second one if you want to and whatever it is you want to set yours up as and there's also a little drop down here which means you can make further changes to your taskbar depending on what you want to set it to i'm pretty happy with the way it is and that's the way i like to normally leave mine but if you want to make other changes you can do and this is where you would make changes to the behavior of your taskbar here you can change the taskbar alignment as well to either left or center on windows 11 on windows 10 you can put it at the top or on the side or wherever it is you want to position your taskbar other than that that is the settings here i'm just going to remove some of these that i don't use and we're pretty much good to go from here and that is the taskbar setup and that is pretty much it it's a basic video on how to set up dual monitors on windows 11 but if you're on windows 10 it's the same sort of principle and pretty much the same for other versions of windows now we need to do is download your wallpaper if you want to extend that across both of the monitors you can do that i find wallpaper engine on steam is probably your best bet for that because people have created those already anyway but that said i hope this one's been some sort of used year i hope this resolves your problem my name has been brian from brighttech computers dot co dot uk i just want to say a quick shout out to all my tier 2 supporters who have joined my youtube members group i really do appreciate the support and your names are rolling up on the screen right now and i shall see you again for another video real soon thanks again for watching bye for now do you\n"