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HowTo Switch monitor 1 Monitor 2 Identity

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Psycogeec

Member
Joined
Sep 15, 2006
Informational post, just in case somone searches for this. beings the answers on the web sucked.
Tested ON XPpro SP3 and should work on all versions of XP at least.

We all know you can set the Primary and seconday, Clone and drag& drop the monitors pictures to arrange the duel desktop.
if a second monitor is recognised First , the second monitor will become Monitor #1 , and the Primary monitor #2, which is just a pickey obsessive compulsive thing, it looks wrong but doesnt really change anything.
It is irritating to hit Identify and have a big 2 in your face on the monitor that can sill be assigned as primary , , , on your primary monitor.

solutions were to toss out some registry entry, and they didnt work till you re-installed All the drivers. Of course re-intalling the drivers with the 2nd monitor disconnected would work, but that is rather drastic, and overdone, it also probably leaves another rack of monitors in there.

what needs to be done instead is, Un-Installing Just the 2 monitors, and then re-installing them, but it doesnt work to do this just in the device manager.

instead go to the registry
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\DISPLAY
there, find the monitors and delete them in the enumeration, you will probably have to right click and set the permissions (even when your admin) to "everyone" to delete these items.
once you do that, physically disconnect the monitor wire you want to call 2 or Second, and when you boot up again, as the primary monitor re-installs it will be #1, and your obsessiveness over the number will be finished.

As always before altering the registry have a backup, or at least backup that section with an Export prior to messing with it. This is the enumeraltions area and you can screw it up pretty badly if you toss out the wrong stuff.
your monitors will be easily found. because the monitors dont go away easily , you may find other leftover monitors or repeats in there as well, as long as you have a good backup toss them out as well.

It is probably good when installing a new card, and messing with drivers for even an old card, to temporarily remove the second monitor till you have the primary working anyway. that way you are less likly to have a big BLANK nothingness on what is supposed to be your primary monitor.

for laptops there are other tricks for changing up the primary (external), this does not apply to laptops.
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Why not just swap the cables on the video card? It fixed it for me.
 
Why not just swap the cables on the video card? It fixed it for me.

that works.
but not everyone can do that, some video cards have only 1DVI 1HDMI and one other thing like DP or Video port. most of the newer ones have 2 DVI adaptable + the third.
 
I know this is a few years old, but thanks for this! Fixed the problem I was having with my TV being my "main monitor" and my monitor being my "projector".
 
I found this thread recently resurrected but--can anyone help me with this EXACT problem? I can't delete the the folders in the 'DISPLAY' section of the registry, as instructed in OP, because a lot of their base have (Default) keys which, to the best of my knowledge, can't be removed regardless of what your permission settings are. Is there some way to do this properly? Or an alternative? This problem only appeared a few weeks ago (after having my current monitor and HDTV setup for years on this PC).

I'm on Windows 7 64-bit. Also, swapping doesn't work: whenever my PC boots-up, it makes sure to detect my HDTV first.
 
I followed the instructions on this page to enable me to delete the display keys from the registry. In my case this did not fix the issue of incorrect monitor identity numbers. I am still searching for a solution to this problem.

http://networkadminkb.com/KB/a44/how-to-run-regedit-as-the-system-account.aspx

Are you using Nvidia drivers? 331.65 drivers (and the beta drivers before that too?) apparently cause this glitch (it's a known issue). On the Nvidia forums, apparently the company is in fact working on this.
 
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