Had an 19" for my secondary monitor, now have a 23". Detect doesn't see it and the resolution I need is not available. Sheer laziness here (and have an ISO downloading at the moment), but is it possible to force a re-detect without rebooting?
EDIT:
Please, I'm not looking for a "how do I setup a secondary display?" kind of answer here.
Thought I was pretty clear, but the issue is that if you swap in a different secondary monitor (and this likely would be the same if you had only one monitor; I suspect it's a limitation of the video card as commented below), it's not obvious whether you can "trick" or coax Windows into detecting the newly-swapped in monitor; I know when you reboot, Windows detects the new display, just wanted to know if this was possible without rebooting.
Best Answer
I have been able to do this, but it is an expert trick. From the comments it sounds like you might be comfortable with this. I am assuming you are familiar with the tools I am describing. If you are not familiar with the tools being described, I do not recommend this trick.
It involves disabling and re-enabling the device driver. The trick works on Windows 7; I have found it does not seem to work on older (e.g. Windows XP) versions; those older versions require you to reboot, which is what you are trying to avoid.
I know of two ways to accomplish disabling and re-enabling the device driver:
With Device Manager, right click on your display adapter and disable. The display will go into VGA mode. Then enable. The display adapter should re-initialize and find the second monitor (assuming it is powered on).
Using DEVCON you will need to find the PCI address of your adapter first. Then you can use commands like the following in a batch file: