Moving to a new desktop

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When the credit card bill turned up on my bank account today, I decided on one further try to upgrade to Pro using all the hints I could find. I never had any replies from the three MS cases I started.

§ First used Backupper system restore and that got me back to an activated Home edition.
§ But MS Store was still showing "completed" on my order even though it wasn't. Some rooting around gave me a suggestion to try troubleshooting the Store App - that reported an unfixable fault.
§ More searching came up with a Store reset command. That promised to reopen the Store when finished. It didn't, but when I did it manually the Upgrade window Buy button miraculously turned back to Install! Clicked that of course.
§ Then it froze saying I now had Pro - but System still showed Home.
§ No instructions on the App so I tried manually closing the App and tried a PC restart.
§ "Installing new Features"!! came up a few times and when the dust had settled, all the baddies had gone away and System reports an activated Pro version at last.

One bright spot - the UK economy is so bad that the bill in sterling when converted to kroner was much cheaper.

Tony

Now that I have all the programmes and devices working correctly I decided it was time to elaborate!

The first Special I want to add is being able to use Dual monitors. My first attempt was to simply use PC Settings/Display to find the second one and set it up. But it couldn't be detected.
I then moved to the similar option on my Nvidea Geforce card and got the same result. I expected that as my main monitor is connected to that card's HDMI port and I was intending to use the second monitor via its VGA connector to the Intel onboard graphics. But now I am stuck!

The Device Manager does not show the onboard graphics and when I looked at the BIOS, they are shown as disabled. The Enable option is 'grayed' out so cannot be chosen. That seems to explain why the second monitor can't be found and configured.

I don't like the idea of using Device Manager to disable the Nvidea card as if the BIOS doesn't recognise the onboard graphics port, I could be in a lot of trouble!

Any ideas?

Tony

Berton said:

I've never disabled the BIOS entry for built-in/onboard graphics when installing an Add-in card, just don't plug a monitor into it. The biggest problem I want to avoid is changing settings in the BIOS for the built-in because of the possibility of failure or removal of the Add-in card will keep one from seeing the necessary things at boot-up, could cause the admittedly-extreme change of the motherboard.

My feelings exactly! In my case, the card was already installed when I bought the PC new so when I used the first boot installation procedure for the OS from scratch, it recognised the Nvidea card+monitor as the default and, presumably, disabled the onboard graphics as unnecessary.

Now I would like to have the possibility to enable the onboard, but in the BIOS it is shown as disabled and is not highlighted. How can I change that so I have the option available to Enable?

Tony

Berton said:

In your case the only thing that comes to mind is removing the Add-in card [usually in the PCIe X16 slot] and see if that reactivates the BIOS setting. If it does then that's a hardware limitation and nothing can be done about it. One thing that could be done involves a new motherboard that has 2 PCIe x16 slots for 2 cards but I would wonder if using cards that have 2 DVI ports each would work. Multi-monitors are good for a number of purposes but can quickly get complicated.

I followed up your remarks by reading through various comments on the Nvidea website and forum. The Geforce design is not meant to share firmware with other graphic firmware and they can't promise that trying to do so will not result in problems. As far as possible they design their card so that the onboard graphics will be switched out when a Geforce card is installed.

I am going to accept that and get a DVI to VGA cable adapter so I can add my older monitor via the Geforce card which has three different ports and its own multi-display software.

Tony