2 monitors caused me massive lag

Hi there

My home setup is a Dell Latitude D500 laptop (doesn't have a recommended graphics card) with a second monitor. The second monitor is nice and large so I have been running SL on there, but recently I went away and took my laptop to be able to work. I had been getting around 2 fps, just about enough to use SL. When I tried SL when I was away I suddenly found I was getting 15 fps or so, everything was moving properly, the whole system was properly responsive. Amazing I thought, maybe its the broadband. But then I looked through this forum for stuff along those lines and all I could come up with was a warning that using 2 monitors can cause a little lag.

So when I came home, I switched off the second monitor, started up SL and ta da! 15 fps. What joy! I also found a problem I had had with never being able to get my av's skin textures to bake and so looking permanently jet black was immediately solved.

So I would seriously recommend any people getting by with substandard graphics cards DONT USE 2 MONITORS!

your larger monitor is probally running at a lot higher resolution witch takes alot more power

Resolution doesnt give you much fps drop unless youre on a pretty old one, SL runs just as fast for me at 1024x768 as 1600x1200 (or as slow?: p) + 1280x720 27"lcdtv other screen.

Some vid cards cant do opengl on multiple screens, if you do youll get a huge fps drop.

well the op stated its an intel card, which the last 900 series one i used couldnt do quake 3 @1024x768(in what looked like 256 colors) over 15 fps let alone anything else