Windows 8 Touchscreen monitor forces Windows to make it the primary monitor

[AGRayRay]

I looked around to see if someone had a solution to my unique problem, but I only found solutions pointing at Control Panel > Tablet PC Settings > Setup, and this does not work for me. This is my monitor setup and my specs:

Monitor 1 - AOC 2060W
1600x900
Connected through DVI

Monitor 2 - a TruTech TV
1440x900
Connected through VGA

Monitor 3 - Acer FT220HQL
1920x1080
Connected from computer's DVI to monitor's VGA
Touchscreen supporting 10 point touch using USB; Windows labels it "Limited Touch Support"

Monitor 3 is left of Monitor 1, and Monitor 1 is left of Monitor 2; 3 then 1 then 2

I am running Windows 8.1 (Version 6.3 Build 9600)

The Acer is my only touchscreen monitor, and it works correctly... when it is the primary monitor. But I do not want that to be my primary monitor; I use the Acer to watch YouTube videos and I tap the video to quickly pause and play. I want the AOC monitor to be my main monitor because I use it to work on pretty much EVERYTHING but Skype, YouTube, and programs I watch like Bandicam. It is a drag to move windows that cover my videos when they should be appearing on my middle monitor.

But when I make the AOC the primary monitor, the touch input never goes to the Acer, no matter what I do. The Setup button on Tablet PC settings does zip. It works correctly when the Acer is the primary monitor, but not when the AOC is. Here is what happens when I use this button. When the Acer is primary:

1. Text on Acer, I touch the Acer, input goes to Acer
2. I press Enter to send the text to AOC, I touch, input goes to AOC
3. I press Enter again to send the text to TruTech, I touch, input goes to TruTech

When the AOC is primary:

1. Text on AOC, touch, input goes to AOC
2. Text on TruTech, touch, input goes to TruTech
3. Text on Acer, I touch the Acer, input goes to AOC, which is wrong!

Note that when AOC is primary, Windows claims that the AOC is the monitor with "Limited Touch Support" and that the Acer has no touch support. Also worth noting is when the TruTech is primary, it has the same behavior when the AOC is primary, with Windows labeling the TruTech with "Limited Touch Support." I tried rearranging the monitors in Windows to see if that would fix it, but they do the same thing. Even arranging them in 1 then 2 then 3 does the same thing.

I have been dealing with this for several months now, and I am finally fed up with it. Is this a bug with Tablet PC Settings, or is there a sneaky set of directions that I am missing? Is it because of the "Limited Touch Support" moving to the primary monitor? I want to know if someone has a similar setup like mine and has ran into this bug or not.

Thanks for reading my issue.

 

[ussnorway]

I don’t have an Acer but my Asus laptop does not have this issue.

I have an old lenovo monitor at work that I connect to with my laptop… this is the main screen whist I’m there because it allows people to see it better but that doesn’t affect the 10 point touch screen functions on my laptop*. I suspect the issue you have is hard wired into the graphics card ports and not driver driven but I can’t test it for you, sorry m8.

* My Asus sonicmaster has both 8 and 8.1 as a dual boot setup.

 

[AGRayRay]

Thanks for the advice. I want to provide additional info on the graphics port setup. The Acer was connected to my graphics card, an MSI R9 270X, while the AOC and TruTech were connected to the motherboard. I messed around with the graphics ports, and I was in fact able to get the touch functionality working with Acer while AOC is primary. This was accomplished by wiring my Acer to the motherboard and the AOC and TruTech to my graphics card. I do not think I have tried that before.

My only concern is if it will slow down games if I play on the Acer while it is wired to the motherboard. I would like to play games in 1080p, and some games do not provide an option on which monitor to play in fullscreen. If I can conveniently make my Acer primary for games without a performance hit, then I will call this case closed. If not, well I will need a new work around.

EDIT: This solution does not fair well for me. I have quite a performance hit when my Acer is not hooked up to my graphics card. I wish to play games in 1080p with a good framerate, so I will need to try something else.

EDIT 2: I continued with this idea and wired both the Acer and the AOC to the graphics card, but it results in the same problem as before: touch never goes to the Acer. So I want three things to happen: touch input goes to the Acer, the Acer is connected to the graphics card, and the AOC is the primary screen.

 

[ussnorway]

1. We need the motherboard to stop acting as primary and put the graphics card first.

The default is to disable motherboard when a g-card is used because the g-card is the stronger processer/ ram combo. On some media motherboards you can still tell the motherboard to slave itself to the g-card (mostly uses ram instead of cpu) and that setting (if indeed it does exist on your model) will be in the motherboard bios.

2. As it is now the system will tend to burn itself out i.e. needs more cooling than normal and if you don't allow for that then yes the games (and system) will suffer... putting heat aside the cpu and ram will have to work harder so high graphics games will have less frames than your g-card.

3. The Asus doesn't need the touch screen controls to play high graphics games so you could play musical cables before firing up the high-g games and just not touch the screen while you play.

 

[AGRayRay]

That would probably be the solution, but it does not work on my end. My computer BIOS is MSI Click BIOS II. I went to Integrated Graphics Configuration and changed the parameter in Initiate Graphic Adapter from IGD to PEG (I assume this is what I change). However, my computer crashes after Windows starts up. I hear my CPU fan speed up but the error collection does not seem to go anywhere. My motherboard model is MSI Z77MA-G45.

It would be a shame if I had to hard-wire my monitors every time I wanted to play a game. If there is no solution to this, I would rather keep my setup the way it is rather than unplugging and re-plugging monitors.

 

[ussnorway]

I haven’t owned an msi for a while now (so from memory) --- On msi boards there are two graphics option hard wired into being.
Clone and extended… these work by deciding one monitor output to be the primary and all others outputs (screens) can clone the primary or extend the primary.

Igd = integrated graphic device and Peg = pci-express graphics device… igd multi setting; enabled = use both and disable defaults to the on board only. The dvmt and inter-graphics share decide how much of the on board ram is reserved for use by ALL the on board graphics and on some models can be set differently for each one.

That bio setting is asking you what should be treated as the primary and therefore which screen should be copied or extended.
1. How much ram has been set aside for use by the igd?
2. What resolution size was set for the screen plugged into the peg?
3. I recommend posting on the msi forum as that may get picked up by people with better working knowing advice.

 

[AGRayRay]

It was set to 32M for Integrated Graphics Share Memory and 128 MB for DVMT. I still crash when I set them to 256M and Maximum, respectively. I left my Acer and AOC connected to the graphics card at both of their maximum resolutions, though the crash screen makes it look like they were in different resolutions. I'll see if it still crashes with just one monitor connected.

And I will try to get in touch with the MSI boards.