Maximum PC

okay, as recommended by a certain editor of a certain online gaming site associated with a gaming magazine I also subscribe to whom will remain nameless...

I set up two displays (tv and monitor) to switch back and forth from working on one (monitor) to playing games, movies and music one the other (tv). Now anyone that's done this knows that it's next to impossible to work from the tv as you need binoculars to read the damn print. Re-scaling it gets to be annoying and if you choose "large print" on your desktop settings it also makes every icon and program interface gargantuan - which is not what I want.

Anyway, the simple solution is to simply toggle which display is the "main" display. Easy enough - or so I thought. I toggled the tv to "main display" last night to play some skyrim (previously attempted playing this on my ps3 and we all know how that turned out), I just got my pc copy yesterday. I wanted to see the graphics difference on the pc on the same size screen. It's quite a tremendous difference - especially with the colors. Much more vibrant on pc than with the ps3. Both are connected via HDMI so everything is exactly the same - but I digress...

I mentioned in another post that I couldn't figure out how to get the screen adjusted properly - I've since solved that.

This morning I got up and switched the primary screen back to my monitor so I could get some work done. Now comes the snafu. - I got my toolbar and taskbar back but all of the icons and gadgets chose to stay on the now secondary display. This was not the case when switching from monitor to tv the first time. Can anyone tell me why this happened and how to fix it? I imagine unplugging the secondary would sort it out but I don't want to have to mess with cables everytime I switch which display is primary.

press windows + p and set to computer only. This will disable the second display and only show your main display. Press it again to enable the 2nd display. See if that fixed it.

that yielded the freakiest result - lol - it worked but listen to what happened...

- It blacked out my primary display and shoved everything to the secondary display - odd right? Then when I hit the windows key again with P it flipped everything back to where it should be on my monitor (primary) screen. So it worked - albeit, in a very odd way. Something got confused somewhere.

yeah, it happens a lot on my laptop when I hook up an hdmi tv on it.

I just realized that this is only happening on the HDMI connection. I previously had it hooked up via DVI as I didn't have a mini USB adapter and had to order one. I switched it back and forth a couple of times previously without incident. Something about the HDMI cable is messing it up.