Virtual PC on two monitors without additional software

February 26, 2008 · 1 min read

I've finally moved my main development environment on my desktop to Vista, and had the issue that I still do quite a bit of work for one client in Visual Studio 2003 which is not supported.  No problem - run up a Virtual PC 2007 image running XP Pro SP2 with just VS2003 and SQL Server 2000 and I have a perfect solution.  On a dual core processer with virtualisation support and lots of memory it runs fine.

However I also run on dual monitors and I'm very used to developing with VS on one screen, and my SQL tools on another.  Also I like Virtual PC in full screen mode.   Unfortunately you cannot maximise, or even resize the Virtual PC screen across both monitors.

But the saviour is the hard to find span option for Remote Desktop, not available via the dialogue but as a command line switch (needs both monitors to have the same resolution);

C:\Windows\System32\mstsc.exe /span

So, configure your Virtual PC image to allow remote connections, start it up, but don't login.  Then use remote desktop to connect over your two monitors.  It all is one big display, 2560 x 1024 in my case, so dialogs get split and you can' maximise code windows but it really works nicely.  The best bonus, running a source code diff in TortoiseSVN over two windows means the original code is one screen and the changed code is on the other - cool.

This article is part of the GWB Archives. Original Author: Liam Westley

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