Why does my system lag so bad when I use two monitors?

[Nitro]

How well does Vista 32-bit work for D3D apps on different monitors versus Vista 64-bit?

I'm a bit hesitant from installing 64-bit because I've been told there is very, very little difference (unless you have > 4GB RAM) and it could only potentially cause problems.

At most a boxer will 5 box, sure there are a few exceptions but that is the general rule. While 5 boxing you have no need for anything more than 4GB, there are no gains to be had in that area.

[Nitro]

I've not tried it but my wife uses UltraMon and I believe I saw settings for soemthing like that.

Ultramon handles dialogs when using dual monitors in twinview not span. Unless they updated int he past 2 years since I looked last .

UltraMon Client 3.0.3 went into beta just over a week ago. I've not looked into it though.

[BobGnarly]

I found XP's Horizontal Span mode with one graphics card and two monitors to be far superior to Vistas Dual Monitor mode with 2 graphics cards and 2 monitors.

I don't run 2 graphics cards, but at least with Vista 64, there is very little difference between running the windows across both monitors and just running them on one. And, overall, it's better than it was even running all the windows on one monitor under XP. Maybe a 32->64 difference.

Moot point for me as horizontal span is not an option for my configuration.

Yeah, I'm using Windows XP. I actually own Windows Vista (Home Premium) but don't have it installed but maybe I'll install it on another partition or something and dual-boot.

I need to use the native resolution on my 24" so I don't think horizontal span will work for me.

Will Vista (32-bit) run the two instances of WoW (on different monitors) at the same speed as running them on one monitor?

I'm assuming my RAM, CPU, and GPU aren't the problem because if I just use one monitor both instances run lightning fast...

I can't comment on 32, but on my machine with Vista 64, there is very little difference between running them all on one monitor and spreading them across two. There was a HUGE increase in multi-monitor PiP switching speed if you are using keyclone and having problems in that area.

How well does Vista 32-bit work for D3D apps on different monitors versus Vista 64-bit?

I'm a bit hesitant from installing 64-bit because I've been told there is very, very little difference (unless you have > 4GB RAM) and it could only potentially cause problems.

If you aren't going to run > 4G, then yeah, 64 might not be worth it. However, I can tell you that a) 64-bit vista has been working just fine for me, not just in multiboxing wow, but with all kinds of other games and applications, and b) RAM is so cheap now, I'd get vista 64 and upgrade your RAM to 8G if you m/b supports it. It made a nice difference for me in places like shat because of the disk caching.

[Farleito]

I'm a bit hesitant from installing 64-bit because I've been told there is very, very little difference (unless you have > 4GB RAM) and it could only potentially cause problems.

If you aren't going to run > 4G, then yeah, 64 might not be worth it.

You need to be very careful here. It depends on your system configuration. If you have two 512MB videocards, that is eating up 1GB of your physical address space. The rest of your hardware (i.e. PCI devices, NICs, Soundcard, I/O controllers, bridges etc) is also taking up some physical address space. What am I getting at? If you have 4GB of RAM, you can only use ~2GB of it in 32-bit Windows, unless you use Physical Address Extensions (which is crap). In this case, you would need to use 64-bit Windows.

My point: Having more than 4MB of RAM is not the only case where you would need a 64-bit version of the OS.