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I have two monitors attached to my Windows 7 computer - a viewsonic monitor and an panasonic plasma tv.
Before I installed the tv - my Viewsonic sonic was the primary monitor. However, for some unknown reason - when I connected my Panasonic plasma tv to my video card - Windows made the TV as the number 1 primary monitor and my viewsonic as the secondary number 2 monitor.
How can I get Windows 7 to reverse those assignments? I want my Viewsonic monitor as the primary, number one monitor.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
When you rt click the desktop and select Screen Resolution, you will be presented with a window showing the two monitors, simply click/hold one of the montors shown and drag it to the required position.
There are also other options, eg Identify, and Display, use the drop down to select the display (monitor) to use as the 'main' display (Some options only impact if you are using Extended Display and not Duplicate display
All I am saying is, the issue resolved for me with dual monitors directly connected to the GPU. I don't have any routing switches.
Of course, swapping the connections from the back of the monitors (not at the GPU) does solve the problem.
Simple. No hardware, software or registry hacks are required for this.
If someone has only a HDMI and VGA cables, swapping the connections might render the display connected to the VGA, only dependent on VGA supported resolutions, if it happens to be a full HD display.
Anyway, I am happily using a correctly configured dual monitor setup.
And of course it doesn't help my situation, where I have one HDMI and one VGA (because it is routed through a KVM). Though the other suggestion of simply unplugging the intended #2 and reconfiguring with only the intended #1 sounds like it might work.
FWIW, when I upgraded from W8.1 to W10, my monitors switched numbers. This means that this is not just a function of the video card. My primary and #1 monitor under 8.1 was on the VGA connector, and the HDMI monitor was #2. Now they have switched. This is highly annoying because a number of apps, such as Google Hangouts, locate themselves on the #1 monitor rather than the primary monitor. Since there was obviously a software-level change, there ought to be a software-level remedy. Dang.
So I know this is has long been answered. But I found out that the specific answer is incorrect. Microsoft's monitor display numbering system depends on which hdmi slot you hook your monitor and tv into, how it reads the drivers for the monitors and loads how the NVCP (nvidia control panel) is set up.
Let's use the an example of dvi. If there are two dvi slots. A dvi-d and a dvi-i. Dvi-d is below the Dvi-i. If you have your main monitor connected to DVI-I and then hook up your secondary display to DVI-D, windows will re-order the display numbering. Window's defaults the display 1 to DVI-D not DVI-I. So if a secondary display such as a tv is hooked into the DVI-D slot on your graphics card, windows will make that the display 1. Your computer monitor then becomes display 2. This is because this is how the default settings were set in the NVCP.
This is the same concept with your HDMI slots. If your tv is hooked into HDMI and your monitor is DVI graphics cards windows reads HDMI as priority in dual monitors. Now this is the tricky part. Graphics cards for some weird reason read TV's as priority by default. Even if the TV is hooked from HDMI to DVI, the TV will get priory. Priority for pre-windows like bios screen gets put on TV's for some reason.
If both displays are hdmi or both displays are DVI, then windows will read the output closest to the motherboard as display 1. This means that you have to swap slots. This is the easiest way if you don't want to bother messing with the settings in the NVCP. However if that doesn't work, you can change the display numbering order in the graphics card settings, using NVCP. Nvidia graphics cards have the Nvidia control panel software come with the graphics card. It's not very hard and you can rearrange priority of your display output slots. If you use on-board motherboard display, then you might have to tamper with the motherboard bios settings for display. It's tricky but it's usually a graphic's card issue reading monitor displays.
If you have an ASUS brand of nvidia graphics cards don't expect too much help. ASUS has horrible customer service.
