can't get y splitter to work on 2 monitors

Hello,

I bought a new Dell Inspiron. I already had 2 pretty old Dell monitors, but they work fine. With my old Dell, I had a y splitter that ran out of the back of the VGA port and split and then each monitor was plugged in to the y splitter. This worked great. I had 2 monitors where the screen worked independently of each other.

For the new Dell, I had to buy a new y splitter. I hook it up to the VGA port and plug each monitor into the y split, like before. Each monitor does get a signal but it shows the same thing on each monitor. It doesn't allow me to select Monitor 1 and Monitor 2. The auto detect doesn't seem to work. Any ideas on how I can get each monitor to work independently of the other?

Thank you

I'm replying so as to kick in the Subscribe and follow it.

The use of a Y-splitter process is quite fine at places like reception desks where the user and client can see exactly the same things.

I have a client with the same problem of wanting different views, so far I've come to the conclusion that a video card with separate output sockets is needed and the Y-splitter is only feeding the same signals to the 2 monitors.

Except that the one I had before had just one vga output going into a y splitter that went to 2 monitors, and each showed independent screens. I'm wondering if the older hardware or newer OS has something to do with it not working anymore.

What you likely have is one of these,

DMS-59 - Wikipedia

Which if that is the case it won't work as the port needs to be the same.

Ah. In the pic below you can see the OLD y splitter that worked. When I got the new pc it had a different port in the back so I could use the old y splitter. I had to get the NEW splitter in the pic. Does this confirm your assumption?

If this is true that I can't split this way, how can I set up the two monitors for separate viewing? Is that still possible?

-Thanks so much for your help!

The 'new' is the VGA type splitter I had to deal with, haven't seen the 'old' type yet, especially not on Notebooks. Even newer/thinner Notebooks don't have the VGA port for external monitors or projectors, have opted for an HDMI port.

Thanks all. So how do I get the two independent monitors with my current pc? I bought the pc for my wife and she's fussing that she doesn't have her expanded desktop. :)

Thanks