Linux upgrading madness

Linux Mint installed everywhere.....
So I posted a few weeks ago that I was going to keep Linux Mint, after trying it for a year. Shortly thereafter I talked my wife into my needing two monitors.

Reluctantly she agreed so I popped down the road and bought myself a ATI HD 3450 video card, plugged it into my system and I sort of got video working. But I needed a second monitor so I popped off to get one. Well, when I plugged it in and turned it on I could really tell the difference between the two LCD displays (old and new). But worse, both images on the screen were the same (cloned) and I wanted them to be different.

I was using Cassandra and I thought 'No problem, I am upgrading anyway. I'll give the settings a poke.'

I tried to edit my Xorg using VIM (boy, is that a pain in the neck to use). Tried Envoy and tried to follow the instructions on ATI's webpage. Not getting anywhere, I upgraded to Daryna because I had that on CD but never got around to installing it. I had the same problems as with Celena. I started checking for fixes and realized that I was still a whole distro behind.

I downloaded Elyssa and wow! It detected my video card and downloaded (from what I can see) the ATI drivers (complete with control panel) with a lot less pain than with the previous two versions.

I then started to set things up. Well, gradually I played with settings in the control panel-still a bit tricky at this point. My wife, who had been watching me play with some of the Compiz features, asked if I would install Mint Linux on 'her' computer. I popped out and got her a second hard drive and installed it. At the same time I figured maybe dissimilar sized LCD monitors were to blame for my problem so I got another LCD monitor.

I installed a dual booting Elyssa and XP on her computer (I think she has only booted to Windows once over the last 2 weeks).

The new monitor did not make a difference. I finally cracked the settings so that the images on my desktop were not cloned. After trying countless times in the ATI control panel I went to control center and found I had to add one setting there under screen resolution.

Still configuring,customizing and optimizing.