2 monitors for gaming?

Published on March 1, 2010 By CharlesCS In PC Gaming

I do a lot of Call of Duty gaming and as a member of a clan we use TeamSpeak to talk during games. We also use xFire and Steam to see who's online and plan team games. Ironically each program lacks features the other has which is a shame.

While I am able to bring up the xFire and Steam UI during game play, TeamSpeak lacks this feature. I can only see who's in what TeamSpeak channel when I have no games running. By the same token, xFire and Steam lack the ability to have voice chat rooms that don't require hitting a button to speak like TeamSpeak does.

My goal is to have a program that works like TeamSpeak and has the ability to allow the UI to be seen during game-play like xFire and Steam. Currently I see no program that can do this so my other alternative is a second monitor. However past experiences have shown that gaming with 2 monitors does not work well when the game in on a single screen as oppose to the gaming being expanded to both screens. The goal is to be able to see the chat programs on one screen while playing on the other. When ever I played a game such as Star Trek Armada II on split screens every time I moved the mouse to the edge of one screen the game would lower itself. Any idea on how to make this work? Or can this work at all? Is there a better solution?

Comments

Aractain

on Mar 01, 2010

If you can get a mouse stopping program to stop it going to the second screen it works well. I have a 17" next to my 40" that has voice, media and other stuff on display.

I belive there are some avlaible somewhere...

CharlesCS

on Mar 01, 2010

mouse stopping program? Hmm, never heard of that.

DethAdder

on Mar 01, 2010

A friend of mine has a proggy to lock his mouse in one monitor, just wish I could recall the name of it at the moment. He might see this and pipe in. If not I'll ask him later and try to get back if you hadn't found a good solution by then.

I have been using two monitors for a couple of years and have found very little trouble with mouse straying even without any additional proggys. Most games in fullscreen on primary mon. will lock the mouse on their own, only problem spots being a few that use archaic edge scrolling. Even then most have alternative and better ways to scroll the map like middle mouse button dragging or something so I rarely ever use edge scrolling.

Edit/Addition: He said he was using ultramon, but when he switched to Win7 64bit it didn't work with it at the time. May have a version up now/soon though.

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