dual monitor help

[brassic]

up till now, ive been running 2 monitors fine until today when i had a software update and now ive lost my 2nd desktop. it says its connected in the settings and ive tried messing with the settings, rebooting, messing with the other screeen and just about everything i can think of. im tearing my hair out here cos its been working fine and it even set itself up on install originally and has been running fine till today. can anyone help or have any idea what might of happened,,,thanks,andy

[Teunis]

You could start by telling us what type of video card (nVidia, Intel, AMD) you have and which drivers you have installed for it.

[SecretCode]

Also, can you set up the second monitor from a new user account?

[brassic]

dunno,, its a dell optiplex 760 with intigrated graphics but its always worked fine with all versions of windows and many every version of linux till now,,, it will probably be easier to do a reinstall. it was all working fine till i rebooted the pc yesterday

[brassic]

ive sorted it now thanks,, i dont know what it was i just kept messing with the settings and the other monitor came on..weird

[SecretCode]

I hate problems that get fixed without being able to tell what the solution was

[brassic]

well it was saying the monitor was there all the time but not putting nothing up,, all i did different was to set the refresh rate from auto to 60 and it came on but it set itself back to auto but still worked,,, just a weird glitch but i know the tv dosent like a high refresh rate so thats what made me try it but its just weird that it was on auto and now its on auto again and working.

[SecretCode]

There's something (which I don't understand) in X about needing to have a unique signature for each monitor. The signature includes the resolution and the refresh rate but I'm not sure if it includes the model or port. My external monitor sometimes shows up as 59.9Hz instead of 60Hz. It sounds like fixing or clearing the refresh rate is what sorted it.