multiple monitor setup question
 

I am using a 3 monitor setup with 2 video cards but primarely use the one in the middle. I would like to have them all on but the outer two in sleep mode and when needed to wake either of them up somehow. It does not appear Vista has any support for sleep settings on a per monitor basis. Anyone know if there is any utility, hack, video card setup or OS that would enable me to do such or is this basically just not possible?

BUY IT: UltraMon

I'm not sure if you can do the sleep mode but I know you can setup multiple screen savers.

I use ultramon also and its great.. not sure it will do the sleep trick tho.. Gonna have to look into that.. would be nice..

I don't think it's possible. In order to sleep or activate the screen saver your mouse has to stop moving and it's not going to track movement per-monitor.

with ultramon you can disable/enable any hooked monitor, it's not as easy as moving your mouse in order to wake it up but can be quickly accessed from the taskbar

Thanks, trying UltraMon now, I see the feature to "disable" what they call a secondary monitor. When I try it the external monitor to my right goes into sleep mode which is good but the one to my left does not even though the mouse can no longer go over to it. Not sure if this feature is supposed to work for one "secondary" monitor or for all non primary monitors.

Looks like it is supposed to put all other monitors to sleep. I found a post that another user is having the same problem and it is due to the display driver not ultramon.

I would say its because of your second video card, its seeing the monitor as detached and not extended

I know an OS that would do it - Linux. I also know a simple way that works for any OS.
Here's the procedure:

http://bettercgi.com/tmp/monitor.jpg

BTW - I'm not trying to be an asshole - clicking the button just
seems like it might be much simpler than what you're going through,
and it won't suddenly fail the next time up grade your video driver or
when Windows crashes on you or whatever.

I hear ya raymor, got a good laugh out of that pic and that is what I have been doing and will go back to. The reason I was interested in any alternative solutions is I have the two monitors on the sides set back quite a bit so my eyes don't burn out (3 30"ers) so they are not within easy reach - I have to get up. If I only needed to do it once a day I would not mind but I find myself needing one or both of them often through out the day. Oh well, I guess it is good exercise as I don't like leaving them running when they are not used.

I can understand, if they're not within easy reach. Are the two side
monitors on the same video card? Not knowing too much about
this topic, it seems like it may be easier to put one card to sleep
than to have the one that stays on be on the same card as one that's
supposed to go to sleep.
I've done a quick little script to put a monitor to sleep on Linux,
you didn't mention which OS you're using.

If you don't get a software solution you like figured out, there's also
the "big button on a cord" solution to the "not within easy reach"
part of the problem. I use that when DJing sometimes - it's like
an extension cord with a big "easy button" for turning it on and off.
The big button part of the cord could be within easy reach of your
hand or even your foot, with the two monitors plugged into it.

It might seem kind of cheesy, but I've been happy with the results from
these kinds of setups. When I first switched from Windows to Linux,
I put a big red switch on the front of my computer where I could switch
between the two, because in my situation switching via software wouldn't
have worked too well at the time. We're currently looking at building a
hardware switch for SATA hard drives. Instead of having all 20 of our
hard drives running all the time, we can switch them on and off using
hardware connected to the motherboard serial port.

Yes both side monitors are on the same card, tried switching cards. Ultramon has a feature to disable all extra monitors which can be assigned to a hot key so that is cool, unfortunatley these NVIDIA cards / drivers I have will not allow both monitors to sleep when disabled. Don't know if another OS like Linux would help, I'm using Vista now. Thanks for the easy button idea, actually a button for each near the keyword would be cool and actually turn them off completly which is even better - gonna try to rig something up.