How to move a fullscreen game to the second monitor?
I may have a solution/workaround if you're using windows 8.1:
- Make your "secondary" (the one you want the game to display the game on) as primary.
- Right-click your taskbar and unlock it.
- Drag and drop your "primary" taskbar (The one with the clock) to your now secondary monitor (the one you don't want the game to be displayed on)
- Right-click your taskbar and go to properties, and go to the navigation tab.
- Check the box stating: "Show Start on the display I'm using when i go to Start and hit OK or Apply
- Drag and drop all your icons from your now Primary monitor to the now secondary monitor.
This makes the secondary monitor feel like the primary, and the games start on the "secondary" monitor.
Windows should treat this as a "profile" which means that when you unplug your external monitor your icons and taskbar should stay on the correct screen, and when you plug it back in, it should go to the defined settings, but I'm not sure about this.
I hope this helps.
A solution I am using involves Steam. Install Steam and start it up in Big Picture mode, under display settings, select the monitor you want to play the game on. By doing this steam changes the windows primary display temporarily until you leave big picture mode. You can add non steam games to your steam library as shortcuts so you can launch any game(or any other program) via Big Picture which launches on the display you chosen.
- Launch Game.
- Hit Alt + Enter.
- Move your windowed game across to the desired monitor.
- Click the game.
- Hit Alt + Enter.
- Play. Interesting solutions here. But ive never encountered a program that didnt un fullscreen from alt + Enter.
One option is to switching your machine to "projector only" mode. Hit "windows key" + P and select projector only mode. This will treat your machine as having only one monitor (in this case, the secondary monitor).
You won't see any more output on your laptop screen, but you will be able to play the game fullscreen on your secondary monitor without performance loss.
Once your game starts, you can turn off projector mode and the game will stay on your other monitor.