Displays

In Customize the Display, we discuss some of the basics of configuring your PC's display. This includes changing the display resolution, scaling, and text size, and enabling and configuring Night Light and, when supported by your display, HDR.

This chapter focuses on more advanced topics related to displays, including multiple display configurations, wireless displays, and how you can use your PC as a wireless display for another PC.
Connect to a secondary display
Windows lets you connect a second display---or even multiple displays---and use them all together in a variety of configurations. Most people with multiple display setups use two displays, but the system works similarly with three or more displays as well.

How you connect a second display to your PC will vary from PC to PC.

Many laptop users will add an external display and use that in tandem with the device's built-in display, perhaps with a USB-C or Thunderbolt dock and additional peripherals like a keyboard, mouse, and webcam. In this configuration, the external display could be connected via a USB-C cable directly to the laptop, or it could connect to a dock with a USB-C, HDMI, or DisplayPort cable.

Desktop computers typically offer more expansion capabilities than laptops, and they can include dedicated video card that have their own display connections. USB-C is common on desktop PCs, of course, but most will use HDMI or DisplayPort to connect with one or more displays.

PCs of all kinds can also connect wirelessly to compatible displays using a technology called Miracast. And you can even use one PC's display as a wireless display for another PC; this is typically done with laptops, which have an display built-in.
Add a second display to your PC
When you connect a second display to your PC using a USB-C, HDMI, or DisplayPort cable, Windows 11 will recognize the new device, trill a notification sound and display a pulsing animation to indicate its success, and make it available for you to use.
As noted in Device Basics, Windows 11 uses built-in class drivers to make this initial connection, but in some cases you can obtain better drivers and related utilities via Windows Update or the display maker's website. This is worth investigating, but if you're using a second USB-C-based display for standard productivity work, the drivers Windows provides are usually all you need.
By default, Windows 11 configures a two-display setup in what's called Duplicate mode, where both displays mirror each other and present the same view, with the same resolution and display scaling on each. If the two displays have different default resolutions, it will use the lower of the two resolutions on each.

This may be the configuration you're looking for. But many will want each display to have its own desktop, each with different apps, use its native resolution, and perhaps have a custom display scale. Fortunately, Windows 11 supports a wide variety of options when it comes to us...