Vista and Horizontal Spanning

[Xevious]

Is there still no way to do this on vista? From several places I have read it appears that vista no longer supports the horizontal spanning which XP supported. I have not really used vista much myself so I haven't been able to try to get around this limitation as I primarily use linux on all my systems but my father recently changed jobs and it sounds like they want to put vista on his comp. Not having horizontal spanning support is a huge limitation if my father is forced to run vista so I was curious if there have been any workarounds for this?

Just so I am clear I am talking about the horizontal spanning IE: making two heads appear to the OS as a single monitor (not extended desktop) thus making it so when you maximize the window it goes over both monitor outputs. This is actually for a single monitor so not having spanning can cause some *really* annoying behavior like maximizing a window being only half the monitor or 1/4th if spanning is not properly supported.

So for the vista experts out there:

Is this possible in anyway or does my father need to beg them to let him use XP instead?

[Xevious]

Ok, after some more research it looks like this is possible by using an XPDM instead of an WDDM driver on windows vista:

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/display/multimonVista.mspx

I assume there is no way to switch nvidia cards into XPDM mode but the above page said:


On Windows Vista, older XPDM drivers still work and the multi-monitor behavior with XPDM drivers hasn't changed, because the operating system uses the legacy graphics stack.


I know XP uses XPDM does this mean I can just download/install the XP drivers on vista so they are XPDM and thus use spanning? Has anyone tried this and had it work?