Windows 8 Consumer Preview

[Technical Ben]

Well, for one thing the app bar thing window does not support mutiple displays. Which is OK for a pc, but not good for a multiple display media system. :/

[armadillo]

I wonder how well Windows 8 will work with multiple display configurations. Support for it in Windows 7 is not particularly good ...

Can you explain in what sense it is not particularly good?

On my Windows XP system, it is the ATI graphics driver (Catalyst) that gives support for two displays. I can switch between either of two displays, with appropriate resolutions and refresh rates for each, or have them both simultaneously as clones. And I can set keyboard hotkeys to switch amongst those modes.

Does Windows 7 prevent that?

[zappaDPJ]

You can do that with both ATI and NVIDIA drivers but there are things you can't do across the entire range of Windows OS. For example you can't spread a single background image/wallpaper across two or more displays. One of the modes gets close but the bottom bar on the primary display interferes with the vertical positioning.

Windows 7 in particular appears to have a problem with remembering the state and positioning of an application window when it was last open, particularly if its on a secondary display. Another major source of annoyance is that clicking on the background of my primary display often causes unwanted action in a maximised window on a secondary display. That might be content lead though and not an OS issue.

I sometimes lose everything pinned to a secondary display on a reboot. That seems to be an issue with Windows 7, I don't recall it happening on Vista. It's really just a lot of small issues like that which need addressing.

[armadillo]

Thank you zap. That is clear now. None of those would be an issue for me but I fully understand that they would be annoying if you need those aspects.

[Technical Ben]

Yep, I had those little niggling things. Nothing major thankfully. Just the tendency for windows to forget and not update the second displays desktop arrangement, so I have to move everything by hand each time. The only other thing is "window focus" but that may be program specific. Most programs are made to "pause" if you click anywhere outside the window. This means running a program (or game ) and trying to click a web page will cause the program to stop. Can be annoying.