External monitor from a laptop
Author
Discussion

glocko

Original Poster:

1,813 posts

279 months

Wednesday 5th April 2006
quotequote all
After carefully treading on my laptop and buggering up the LCD screen I need a temporary solution.
I've connected a LCD monitor to it and when I boot up all I get is my laptop wallpaper on the monitor, no icons curser etc (although they do appear on what's left of my laptop screen)
The laptop does work, no mechanical damage.
Have I not done all of the settings correctly?
Thanks chaps
Running XP btw

Plotloss

67,280 posts

300 months

Wednesday 5th April 2006
quotequote all
This may be tricky...

The desktop is in all probability set to extend onto the second monitor rather than be a duplicate of the laptop screen.

Some laptops allow you to switch this by hotkey, some require you to go into settings, which will obviously be difficult as you cant see the screen.

You could try and remember the keystrokes to get to control panel>display settings and then move the window with the cursor to the new monitor perhaps?

glocko

Original Poster:

1,813 posts

279 months

Wednesday 5th April 2006
quotequote all
I can see enough of the screen for it to be useable, i've just lost the bottom right quarter

_Deano

7,414 posts

283 months

Wednesday 5th April 2006
quotequote all
right click on the area of the desktop that you can see and choose the properties option (at the bottom of the box that appeared) you can then lower the resolutions to something like 1024x768 so everything should be on the LCD screen that is connected to your laptop.

john_p

7,073 posts

280 months

Wednesday 5th April 2006
quotequote all
Do you have a button on the keyboard that selects between displays? Fn-F5 or something on my Dell.
This switches between

"LCD only"
"External only"
"LCD and External"

it might be that windows is spreading the desktop across both monitors when it is in "LCD and External" mode