I have a dual monitor setup at my desk at work (with my laptop – which is then linked via Input Director to my single monitor desktop). I just happened to stumble in Control Panel on my work laptop, which is Win XP, NVIDIA nView Desktop Manager. Upon launch, there was a button to enable the advanced settings which I did. I was able to set a different wallpaper for each monitor. Nice! Thinking I have an NVIDIA GeForce in the home system, which is Windows 7, I should have this functionality there. But I guessed wrong, the option was not there for me in Control Panel. Good time to update my drivers to see if the latest includes the nView Desktop Manager.
I installed the latest drivers for the GeForce 8 series, rebooted, and still no dice. I Googled for any solutions, and checked some forums that came up in the search. There are some folks out there that are quite upset that NVIDIA apparently decided to no longer include this in the install of drivers by default. But there was a solution that stated to take the download of the driver, expand it using something like Winrar or 7-Zip, then expand the nview.cab file, then launch the install found once expanded. When I did this though, there was no nview.cab. A little more research revealed that NVIDIA is no longer including this in the GeForce driver, but Quadro drivers only. I downloaded the Quadro driver. I then expanded this using 7-Zip and sure enough the nview.cab was there. Expanding this and running the setup for nView Desktop Manager worked without any issues. Note I DID NOT install the Quadro driver for my GeForce. I only used the Quadro download for the purposes of getting the desktop manager installed.
I now have dual monitors with different backgrounds (see below). This should hopefully work for anyone with a GeForce card that wants this functionality.
Edit Oct 28, 2010: Based on some comments, it looks as though this is no longer available in the current versions (259.x, 260.x) of the drivers. If you do download, you’ll want to go for an older version (197.x and others) – so long as they are still available.
The Science Attic 
29 replies on “NVIDIA nView Desktop Manager On Windows 7”
[…] 1, 2010 by Jim Leave a Comment A couple of posts back, I mentioned how I got the Nvidia nView Desktop Manager to work in Windows 7. What it did for […]
thank you, i’ll try it soon.
No problem. Hopefully it should work for you as well.
Hi … I downloaded the Quadro driver set for 64 bit Win 7 and unzipped the nview cab file. However, when I attempted to run the nview installation file, I received an error that nview is not supported on my hardware … a GEForce card. Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Steve
Hi Steve,
I used 7-zip to extract the full driver set, then unzipped the nview.cab file. I noticed though that the driver set also has an nviewsetup.exe file. Perhaps try that one as well, if the one inside the cab does not work.
The version I did this from was the latest at the time, 197.28. It looks like they have a newer version, so I’m wondering if they’ve added a check to see what card is in the system. I’ll try the later version when I get a chance.
Post if you are able to install it using the other nviewsetup.exe though.
Hope that helps.
Hi,
I tried with the latest quadro driver : 259.57, and same as Steve, nview is not supported.
I downloaded the 197.28 instead and it works without any problem.
Thank you.
Thanks for that Antoine. Good info to know!
Neat, this still works. Downloaded the Quattro driver off NVidia’s site: http://www.nvidia.com/object/Quadro_win7_winvista_64bit_197.28_whql.html
Same here. Tried 191.07 instead of 260.x and it works without any problems.
Thanks for posting this info Lukasz. I’ve just updated the post to indicated it appears this is no longer available in the newer versions.
Hi,
does this work for spanning spreadsheet acros both mointors as well, or maybe the taskbar too? Or is it just able to do dual wallpapers?
Hi Nadeem,
I’ve been able to resize a window, such as Excel to span both monitors, as long as it isn’t maximized. I don’t believe this is an nView function though as it should work in Windows regardless of video driver used.
I don’t believe you can increase your taskbar to span both monitors. My setup has the taskbar on monitor 1 and no taskbar on monitor 2. I didn’t see this as an option in nView when I poked around.
Hope this helps.
Hello.
I don’t understand. I did all these things, but when I start the nviewsetup.exe, the installation doesn’t work. “installation failed”…
Do you have the same problem ? Or any solution please?
Thanks!
Hi DraYz,
Maybe try both nviewsetup.exe. There should be one when you extract the driver, but then another when you extact the nview.cab within, there is one there as well.
Also, some folks have had trouble with newer versions of the driver. If it’s still available, try to download an older one from nvidia, i.e. 197.x.
Hope this helps.
The version you listed does work, the newest ones however do check hardware. Thanks for this, worked like a charm! Wouldn’t have to do this in the first place if Nvidia wasn’t so greedy. Thanks again.
Thanks for writing this. I was trying to update my driver on my Geforce cards/multimonitor and got the same prob of nview not installing on my Win 7 machine. Strangely the driver stuff that came with my Gainwards cards installed ok, but after updating the driver it deleted nview, then wouldn’t load the old one either. So after a lot of faffing around, I found the Quadro 197.28 driver, used 7-zip to expand it then extracted the nview.cab folder to my machine, and it installed.
My Win 7 UAC goes screwy sometimes, so I did then have to go through a palaver to give myself the permissions to use it. Anyway, all is good now! Thanks
Next time I update drivers I shall not use the auto installer but do them one by one myself and leave the ol’ nview alone.
Cheers! Much appreciated.
I tried following these instructions.
I downloaded Quadro 197.85 drivers, extracted the nView.cab file and the nViewSetup.exe seemed to run OK.
However, where now is nView Desktop Manager? I can’t find an icon.
I do have a Program Files/NVIDIA Corporation/nView folder, but it contains nvAppBar.exe, nViewSetup.exe (does nothing), nvTaskbar.exe and nwiz.exe. None of which seem to launch nView.
OK, forget that request. I found it in Control Panel!
Seems to work great – thanks for the advice!
No problem, thanks for posting your experiences Jason, Fes, and Gwyn!
Thank you very much, my friend…it works perfectly!!
I don´t understand Nvidia…
Not working. Get message on nViewSetup.exe “nView is not supported on this hardware for this operating system.” on Win 7 x64.
Perhaps try one of the older versions. Based on some folks experience, it looks as thought the newer ones check the hardware…
Awesome!!! it worked!!! thanks you soooooooooooooo much!!!!
Great! Glad folks are still finding this post useful.
lol – any instance of driver are not working BUT http://www.nvidia.com/object/Quadro_win7_winvista_64bit_197.28_whql.html it does !!! i try ” 285.62-desktop-win7-winvista-64bit-international-whql.exe ” on my system and nview from 197.x
BIG THX !!!
Thank You! I worked for me too on GeForce GTX460!
I can’t understand why NVidia has done this! 😦
Thank You again!
Nice! Glad this is still working for folks.
everything went well for me too. http://ratemydesktop.org/pm/MV4R/dual_monitor.html looking better now. thanks!
Very very very Thank you!!! My Windows7 at nView running. All okay!!! I’m very happy 🙂