Ghosting, Connectors and Adapters: VGA, HDMI, and DVI (DVI-I, DVI-D, DVI-A, etc.)

I was using two monitors.  Each had both VGA and DVI connectors.  Connecting the second monitor via VGA gave me occasional ghosting (i.e., a block of color would smear from left to right, slightly visible beyond where it was supposed to be).  It appeared to be a VGA-related problem.

I guessed (maybe with the aid of some previous browsing) that the problem would go away if I used DVI or HDMI instead.  I would have liked to connect both via DVI or HDMI, but the computer had only one VGA, one DVI, and one HDMI jack.  I had a spare video card, but it too had just one DVI and one VGA jack.  It looked like video cards with two DVI jacks or two HDMI jacks were expensive.  (Later, prices on at least one such card had dropped to $70, though that was still more than I cared to pay.)

The motherboard did have an unused HDMI jack, so I bought a DVI-to-HDMI adapter.  But the HDMI port was right next to the DVI port, on both the motherboard and the optional video card.  The adapter was too big to fit there, if I was also using the DVI jack.  The adapter had a female DVI connector, so I couldn't use it on the other end, at the monitor, where a male connector was needed.

It seemed that I needed an HDMI cable to run from the computer to the monitor, and a male DVI adapter to connect to the DVI port on the monitor.  The question there was which kind of male DVI adapter I needed.  Based on drawings at Wikipedia, there appeared to be at least a half-dozen possibilities.  As elsewhere in life, it seemed the ideal solution would involve the minimum number of pins on the male side, and the maximum number of sockets on the female side.  That would minimize the risk that there would be one or more male pins without a corresponding female socket, in which case no connection would occur.

All DVI configurations seemed to consist of a spadelike (flat, wide) connector at one side (let's say the left) and one or two roughly rectangular arrays containing 12 to 24 small round pins on the other side (i.e., in the center and toward the right).  The DVI-D offered one ideal male configuration, insofar as its spadelike connector was not surrounded with four extraneous round pins.  The Single Link option offered another ideal male configuration, with only 18 pins arranged in two clusters of nine in the center and on the right (rather than 24, as in the Dual Link alternative).  Putting these two together, the most available male was the DVI-D Single Link:  its spade side would match any DVI female, and the two sets of nine pins on its right side would match all DVI-I and DVI-D females.

The DVI-A appeared to be an especially troublesome case, with four additional pins on the spade side and irregular groups of four and eight pins on the right side.  It seemed that a female DVI-A would be able to mate only in an equally irregular DVI-A male cluster setting.

The female DVI jacks on both the computer and the monitor offered a relatively agreeable DVI-D Dual Link connector, with the maximum number of sockets in the right-side cluster.  They fell slightly short in not offering the extra four sockets on the spade side that a female DVI-I Dual Link connector would have provided.  This would have mattered if I had been trying to use a DVI-I cable, but I wasn't.  Both ends of my cable had the felicitous DVI-D Single Link male connector, which would be able to get along with almost any female aside from the DVI-A.

It seemed, then, that my HDMI cable, running from the computer to the monitor, was looking to be teamed up with a male DVI-D adapter, not a male DVI-I.  (As a mnemonic, I thought of the harder-to-mate DVI-I male as Idiosyncratic, in contrast to the more agreeable Dude.)  The male DVI-D could be either Single or Dual Link, thouigh the former would be more suitable for other possible connections in the future.  On the other hand, not being familiar with video electronics, I thought maybe the greater number of pins in the Dual Link might yield more pleasing results.

I viewed some debates on DVI vs. HDMI. The sense I got was that HDMI was more convenient (easier connectors, audio inline) but DVI-D was more reliably good.  If my monitors had offered an HDMI jack, I could have tried an HDMI Y-adapter to get around the single HDMI jack on the computer, but that wasn't in the cards for me now.

I was able to order a generic HDMI cable and adapter for about $7 total.  When they arrived, I hooked them up.  The HDMI-connected secondary monitor looked great!  Now I had a new problem.  The primary monitor, connected by DVI cable, was blank.  Device Manager (in Control Panel) was fine with the idea that I now had only one monitor.  Device Manager > View > Show Hidden Devices did not make any difference.  I went into Device Manager > Display Adapters > ATI Radeon HD 4250 > right-click > Properties > Driver tab > Update Driver > Search automatically.  It said I already had the best driver.  I ran a search.   There were the inevitable suggestions to update drivers, but that didn't seem to be helping these people.

I tried unplugging the HDMI.  Now the DVI was working.  Replugged the HDMI; now no DVI.  Evidently I could have one or the other but not both.  Tried using VGA instead of DVI for the primary monitor.  Same result:  I could have one monitor or the other, but not both.  But then, correction:  unplugging and replugging did give me VGA and HDMI working simultaneously:  primary VGA, secondary HDMI.  No VGA ghosting at the moment.  Funny, Device Manager listed both monitors as being Analog.  Maybe I didn't need HDMI -- maybe I should have just tried using VGA (primary) - DVI (secondary) instead of the opposite, DVI-VGA?

Anyway, I left it like that:  VGA primary, HDMI secondary.  When I finished this writeup for posting, a couple weeks later, there was still no ghosting, so this seemed to be a fix.

A Two-Computers-Per-User Desktop Arrangement

I was spending a lot of time at my desk, doing word processing and other typical desktop work.  For this purpose I was using a customized Windows 7 installation on two networked computers for maximum productivity.  This post describes that setup.

I had previously thought that, ideally, I would have four computers:  one laptop; one test machine to hook up the occasional hard drive or other component for wiping, testing, etc.; and two desktop machines running side-by-side.  Since then, however, I had switched from Ubuntu back to Windows and had found this to be a good move.  So now I was doing very little testing and tinkering with hardware.  Therefore, I dismantled and sold the parts from the fourth computer.

With almost all of my work happening on just two computers, and with a stable Win7 installation on each, the focus now was on getting the most out of them.  I was using two desktop computers instead of one because there were still many occasions when a computer would experience downtime.  I would be doing drive maintenance or imaging, or would still have to reboot Windows now and then to clear its head or to complete a program installation or upgrade, or Win7 would be running just fine but there would be some scanning or something else going on that would tend to monopolize the machine for practical purposes.  I was not yet very impressed with multiple desktop software and was considering a return to VMware or some other virtual machine software, perhaps in a virtual appliance, though I wasn't sure I wanted to get back into the performance issues that had prompted me to try to use a native and/or bootable virtual hard disk or RAID array to improve the really bad performance I had started getting in VMware.  So the second computer was also useful as a simple way of having a pretty solid alternate desktop.  I could start up a project or leave a set of folders open there and just visit it occasionally, when the primary computer was doing its own maintenance or was otherwise unavailable for a while.

The starting point for this two-computer arrangement was to set up two machines that were almost identical in terms of hardware and software.  In previous years, I had thought it was best to have dissimilar machines, so as to maximize resources.  One machine or the other would have the right hardware or software to deal with almost any kind of system problem.  That belief was probably justified for some purposes.  Now, however, I was less patient with that, and it also seemed less necessary.  A lot of the old problems had gone away.  Meanwhile, it was much easier to learn how to maintain and troubleshoot just one set of problems, rather than have to learn the whys and wherefores of divergent sets of hardware and software.  For purposes of getting my work done, Windows 7 was a significant improvement over operating systems I had used previously, including Windows XP and Ubuntu 10.10, in terms of networking and other capabilities.

The customized Win7 installation (see link above) was not as easy as a canned, plain-vanilla installation, but once I had it set up, it had some advantages.  One important step was to make my work files available on both computers.  My first attempt in this regard was to use a Synology network-attached storage (NAS) unit as a simplified file server, but that hadn't worked so well for me.  In the second attempt, I used my home network (basically, just a router and cables to the two computers, though possibly a crossover cable would have sufficed even without the router).  After some contemplation, I went with GoodSync to keep the two computers directly synchronized with one another.  This was an important development.  When combined with appropriate program settings (e.g., setting Microsoft Word to AutoRecover files every minute), it meant that, if the computer I was working on suddenly crashed or otherwise became unavailable, I could usually switch over to the other machine and pick up right where I left off.

I used GoodSync to synchronize my data partition (drive D), not the program partition (drive C).  I also used it to synchronize parts of the INSTALL partition, including particularly the funky but advantageous shared Start menu.  GoodSync did not need to be running on both computers, so I installed it on computer A.  As the installation evolved, I found that computer A was handling most of my computer maintenance and other functions, while I did more of my moment-by-moment productivity stuff on computer B.  In particular, computer A was becoming my backup hub.  I would save a file on computer B; GoodSync would copy it to computer A; and then my backup software would copy it to other drives.  After a variety of unpleasant backup surprises, I had evolved to two distinct backup systems running on computer A.  In the first backup system, I was using Robocopy, as part of my customized installation (above), to make frequent, incremental backups to a separate partition on computer A.  This was one of the few regards in which computer A differed from computer B in terms of hardware:  it had three hard drives rather than two, so as to speed this internal copying (since it was faster to copy from one hard drive to another, rather than between partitions on the same drive) and make it safer (since a failure of one drive would usually not affect the other).  In the second backup system, I was using Beyond Compare to do daily manual backups to an external drive that I could carry or store offsite as needed.  These were manual in the sense that I had to click things to make them happen, and could therefore examine or at least spot-check what was going to be changed, if I wanted to.

Again, I could still use either computer to do my work, since they both had the same synchronized files and nearly identical software installations.  Nonetheless, as the functions of the two computers diverged, I found that I was not really utilizing both monitors most of the time.  On computer B, I tended to be opening PDFs, Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, Windows Explorer sessions, and webpages, among which I would copy text, links, and other materials.  I could open some of that stuff on computer A instead, but it was cumbersome to have this happening on two different computers, and for the most part it actually was not happening on computer A.  That computer, and its associated monitor, were mostly just sitting there, working up a file comparison in Beyond Compare or otherwise doing things that did not really need to be watched constantly.

What I really wanted was to make monitor A available for computer A, when I wanted to see what was happening on computer A, but to have monitor A also available for computer B, when I was doing my ongoing work on computer B.  This called for a keyboard-video-mouse (KVM) switch.  The PS/2 type of KVM was better for purposes of providing keyboard and mouse input during BIOS setup and in programs that would boot from a CD (e.g., Acronis Drive Image) and would therefore be at least partly unresponsive to a USB mouse and/or keyboard.  Unfortunately, I did not realize that the type of motherboard I had installed in both computers did not have two PS/2 ports, so I had to use a USB KVM.  It also seemed that I might have to spring for a more expensive DVI-compatible KVM, since I'd gotten some poor video performance when I had connected the monitor to the computer using the older D-Sub rather than the newer DVI kind of cable.  In recent months I had been using the KVM only for the keyboard, while leaving each monitor dedicated to one computer and experimenting with having a separate mouse for each computer, so that I could click without having to transfer keyboard (and, optionally, monitor) focus between computers.  It had lately occurred to me, though, that the D-Sub video quality problems might just be due to the quality of the video circuits on the motherboard.  So at this point I was planning to get a dedicated video card for each computer and see whether its D-Sub connection would work acceptably, in which case I could use the USB/D-Sub KVM for the keyboard and for D-Sub video with monitor A.  In other words, monitor B would continue to be dedicated to computer B, but monitor A would run to the KVM and could thus toggle between computers A and B.

This left the problem that, as I had discovered, when I was not seeing events on computer A, I tended not to use that computer.  That was not terrible -- it would still be there as a running backup, ready to jump into service when I needed it, unless it hibernated itself in the meantime -- but experience suggested that, if I could not just glance to see what was happening on computer A, I would tend not to toggle over there on the KVM and take a peek.  I thought of two solutions to this.  One was to set up a reminder that would prompt me, every hour or two, to interrupt what I was doing on computer B, toggle the KVM, and look at events on computer A as displayed on monitor A.  I suspected I might tend to disregard that kind of reminder, but I decided to give it a try.  An alternative was to get a small, dedicated monitor that would just always be displaying events on computer A, though I realized its tiny resolution would not very well display all the stuff that would tend to appear on my widescreen monitor A.  It looked like I could get a monochrome 10-inch Miracle Business MT209A CRT on eBay for $25 including shipping, but I didn't want the clutter or the extra power consumption.  What seemed like a more practical option was rather to go with a full-sized monitor dedicated to computer A.

That's where this matter rested for the time being.