How to disable monitor auto detection in Windows 7?

Posted by Jay Yother on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Jay Yother
Published on 2010-03-17T15:21:37Z Indexed on 2010/03/17 15:31 UTC
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I am currently running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit with a dual monitor setup with an NVIDIA 7950 GT graphics card. One monitor is dedicated to this machine and the other monitor is connected to a DVI KVM switch.

When I switch to my other computer, Windows 7 disables the monitor. However, when I switch back it does not re-enable the monitor. The only circumstance that automatically re-enables the second monitor is when I switch back after Windows has put the monitors into power save mode. I am continually having to bring up the NVIDIA control panel to have it re-enable the monitor.

Under Windows XP I would just disable the NVIDIA service to prevent it from auto-detecting the monitor (which doesn't solve the problem under Win7), and in Vista there was a registry hack that would prevent this. It looks as though that has been removed in Windows 7.

I have found similar questions posted on this site, but nothing that matches my problem exactly. The following link is the question that comes the closest, but does not provide a solution to the problem.

http://superuser.com/questions/96683/how-to-fix-monitor-detection-on-windows-7

Is there a way in Windows 7 to disable monitor auto-detection?

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