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Setting Up and Using Your Computer 17
Changing the Display Settings
1
After you connect the monitor(s) or TV, turn on the computer.
The Microsoft
®
Windows
®
desktop displays on the primary monitor.
2
Enable clone mode or extended desktop mode in the display settings.
• In clone mode, both monitors display the same image.
• In extended desktop mode, you can drag objects from one screen to the other, effectively
doubling the amount of viewable work space.
For information on changing the display settings for your graphics card, see the user’s guide in
the Help and Support Center (click the
Start
button, click
Help and Support
, click
User and
system guides
, click
Device guides
, and then click the guide for your graphics card).
About Serial ATA Drives
Your Dell™ Dimension™ XPS computer supports up to three serial ATA hard drives. Serial ATA
drives provide the following benefits by transferring data using serial technology and flexible cables
that are thinner and longer than IDE cables:
• Improved cable routing facilitates more efficient airflow inside the chassis.
• Compact cable connectors save space on the system board and on the hard drive. Combined
with the improved cable routing, this allows a more efficient utilization of space inside the
chassis.
See "Hard Drive" on page 84 for information on serial ATA drive connections.
About Your RAID Configuration
This section provides an overview of the RAID configuration that you might have selected when
you purchased your computer. Although several RAID configurations are available, Dell offers
either RAID level 0 or RAID level 1 for its Dimension computers. A RAID level 0 configuration is
recommended for high-performance gaming, and a RAID level 1 configuration is recommended for
the data integrity requirements of digital photography and audio.
The Intel RAID controller on your computer can only create a RAID volume using two physical
drives. If a third drive is present, then that drive cannot be made part of a RAID volume using the
Intel RAID configuration program, although it can be used as a spare drive in a RAID 1
configuration (see "Creating a Spare Hard Drive" on page 24). However, if four drives are present in
your computer, then each pair of drives can be made into RAID level 0 or RAID level 1 volumes.
The drives should be the same size in order to ensure that the larger drive does not contain
unallocated (and therefore unusable) space.
NOTE: RAID levels do not represent a hierarchy. A RAID level 1 configuration is not inherently better or
worse than a RAID level 0 configuration.