Display mess I caused

[Chet]

Running Vista Home Premium on my laptop. Worked fine. I bought a new LCD
TV which has a VGA input on it. I connected a VGA cable to TV and to my
laptop. Turned laptop on. It must have recognized my new TV/monitor. When
I selected the input source on the TV/monitor as "PC" the pc output went to
both my computer and the large TV. Great.

Well, not knowing when to leave well enough alone, I got into the
personalize display section and started fooling around with resolultion
settings, lost video to both screens, got it back, not sure how, but just to
the laptop. The personalize display program can recognize both #1 and #2
monitor for me. # 2 is the TV/monitor. As a setting in this program, I
have the monitor #2 (TV) checked to "send desktop to the monitor" and
unchecked "this is my main monitor. Well the background of the desktop
goes to the TV but other than the background, nothing else. No icons, no
program output, e.g. pictures I plan to show via the TV etc. Frustrated.
What did I do to mess it up and how do I fix it.

Thanks.

Chet

 

[Manny Weisbord]

Running Vista Home Premium on my laptop. Worked fine. I bought a new LCD
TV which has a VGA input on it. I connected a VGA cable to TV and to my
laptop. Turned laptop on. It must have recognized my new TV/monitor. When
I selected the input source on the TV/monitor as "PC" the pc output went to
both my computer and the large TV. Great.

Well, not knowing when to leave well enough alone, I got into the
personalize display section and started fooling around with resolultion
settings, lost video to both screens, got it back, not sure how, but just to
the laptop. The personalize display program can recognize both #1 and #2
monitor for me. # 2 is the TV/monitor. As a setting in this program, I
have the monitor #2 (TV) checked to "send desktop to the monitor" and
unchecked "this is my main monitor. Well the background of the desktop
goes to the TV but other than the background, nothing else. No icons, no
program output, e.g. pictures I plan to show via the TV etc. Frustrated.
What did I do to mess it up and how do I fix it.

Try running System Restore to a point preceding your messing around.

 

[Chet]

SNIP

Try running System Restore to a point preceding your messing around.

I was/will try that. I just was hoping that someone here might know
specifically what did it and what specific thing would fix it. I find it
interesting. A system restore might fix it but I'll never know what it
was!

Chet

 

[JEWboy]

using Windows Restore point is easy but not intelligent. Go play with Video
settings again and try to avoid restores, in fact I disabled restore service
was eating immense amount of disk space and SLOWES down your processor is
busy creating restore points....
I know I take chances, but I use other methods of protetcion, too long to
exaplain. Foolproof, dump to external Firewire800 or Ethernet harddisk
pumping at 1Gbps.

Anyways, you can follow that person's advise about WindowsRestore or I'd go
back to Video settings and try to restore manually.
Restore point will kick some of your new settigns back to history unless it
was made liek yesterday, or upto a week ago?

 

[Chet]

Right click on desktop> Personalization In left column under TASKS, Click
on "Connect to a projector or other external display"

You will be in Windows Mobility Center.
Click on "Connect Display" even though it might say "already connected"
in the External Display box.
"New Display Detected" will come up.
Select "Duplicate my desktop on all displays (Mirrored). THIS STEP
WAS THE FIX
Then click Apply

This gives you identical output on the external monitor as what you see on
the laptop monitor.

However, as before, the resolution on the external (TV) monitor is quite
good, but the resolution on the laptop has deteriorated. I had noticed this
before but don't know why other than the fact that the VGA output to the
external monitor is different from what the laptop takes.

Settings I end up with at highest for laptop is 1024x768. External monitor
is running at 1280x720 despite being capable of 1920x1080. Now I
remember how I made the mess before. I was experimenting and put the
external display at 1920x1080 and lost all output to the laptop and only had
a cursor on the external. Couple restarts got me into the mess (fixable)
that I first wrote about and have now fixed.

Thanks. Any thoughts on the different resolutions? Perusing the Acer
manual, it makes some passing reference to the possibility that resolution
might have to be reset after using external devices for "Presentations."
Haven't gotten in to that too much yet.


Chet

 

[Manny Weisbord]

SNIP



I was/will try that. I just was hoping that someone here might know
specifically what did it and what specific thing would fix it. I find it
interesting. A system restore might fix it but I'll never know what it
was!

Chet

It was YOU... be more careful when you play around.

Make a restore point before playing.

Have a good backup strategy in place and up to date.

 

[Chewie]

It was YOU... be more careful when you play around.

Make a restore point before playing.

Have a good backup strategy in place and up to date.

Such an arrogant post in a help forum!
Christ, if advising the use of System Restore is the answer to all problems,
I'll be an MCSE in no time!
If you don't know the answer, just say so.

 

[Mike]

Such an arrogant post in a help forum!
Christ, if advising the use of System Restore is the answer to all
problems, I'll be an MCSE in no time!
If you don't know the answer, just say so.

This is not a "forum." It's a public newsgroup. If you don't like what
you're reading, turn off the computer and step out your front door and visit
the real world.

 

[Michael Walraven]

Just some thoughts, I do not have a dual/TV display so cannot check if I am
correct.
When you have two displays with different resolutions then in the video card
there must be maintained two separate memory segments. This means that more
memory is needed than if only one display is used. It MIGHT be true that if
you reduced the resolution on one display (TV for instance) that you could
increase the resolution on the other (laptop).

Michael

 

[Manny Weisbord]

Such an arrogant post in a help forum!
Christ, if advising the use of System Restore is the answer to all problems,
I'll be an MCSE in no time!
If you don't know the answer, just say so.

I take it that you didn't make a restore point and that you don't have
a backup.

You're a bozo.

 

[Alan Montgomery]

Right click on desktop> Personalization In left column under TASKS,
Click on "Connect to a projector or other external display"

You will be in Windows Mobility Center.
Click on "Connect Display" even though it might say "already
connected" in the External Display box.
"New Display Detected" will come up.
Select "Duplicate my desktop on all displays (Mirrored). THIS
STEP WAS THE FIX
Then click Apply

This gives you identical output on the external monitor as what you see
on the laptop monitor.

However, as before, the resolution on the external (TV) monitor is quite
good, but the resolution on the laptop has deteriorated. I had noticed
this before but don't know why other than the fact that the VGA output
to the external monitor is different from what the laptop takes.

Settings I end up with at highest for laptop is 1024x768. External
monitor is running at 1280x720 despite being capable of 1920x1080.
Now I remember how I made the mess before. I was experimenting and put
the external display at 1920x1080 and lost all output to the laptop and
only had a cursor on the external. Couple restarts got me into the mess
(fixable) that I first wrote about and have now fixed.

Thanks. Any thoughts on the different resolutions? Perusing the Acer
manual, it makes some passing reference to the possibility that
resolution might have to be reset after using external devices for
"Presentations." Haven't gotten in to that too much yet.

With two displays there are 4 distinct ways you can use them, and the best
way to go between them on a laptop is to use the switch display key. This
is usually function + a FKey, on my eePC its Fn+F5 and has a blue legend
representing lcd and monitor.

The 4 ways are

a) Display 1 - only the first display (built in LCD) is used.
b) Display 2 - only the second display (external monitor) is used.
c) Shared - both displays are used and they display the same thing, this
imposes an additional limitation that they must then have the same
resolution and colour depth.
d) Combined - both displays are used, but they show distinct parts of the
desktop. The two displays can be set to different resolutions, but there
may be parts of the desktop that aren't visible.

When the LCD looked bad, the problem was likely that it was being driven
at 1280x720, which is not a good match for its native resolution of
1024x768, so you were seeing distortion caused by the difference in aspect
ratio, and the fairly basic hardware rescaling provided by the LCD display.
When you upped the resolution you went beyond the capabilities of the LCD,
so it stopped displaying.

When you got two different resolutions, you were probably in combined
mode, and the reason nothing appeared on the second display is you didn't
have anything on that part of the desktop.

I would reccomend the following settings.


1) Set it up in display 2 at its highest (native) resolution.
2) Set it up in combined, with both at their highest (native) resolution,
with display 2 (external) as the main monitor. Drag the other monitor
round (in display properties) so it is in the correct relative position.
You can move between the displays by moving the mouse accross the part of
the edge of the screen where the displays touch, anf you can drag windows
to the other display.

In both cases if the external display is not present it should
automatically fall back to display 1 mode.

 

[RalfG]

OP is running his system in clone mode which requires using the same
resolution on both displays. There was nothing actually wrong in the way
that he had set up the displays initially, as that was how Extended display
mode normally works. Clone mode displays the same output on both monitors
while extended mode only extends the desktop area onto the secondary
monitor. In extended mode each display can be set to different resolutions
and refresh rates and different apps can be opened on each monitor.

The best image quality on LCD displays is only achieved when using their
native resolution. Unless the TV and monitor have the same native
resolution, when he uses clone display mode he is stuck with using the
highest common resolution that both displays can handle. In this case the TV
appears to be lower resolution than his monitor so the image quality on the
monitor suffers as a result.

 

[Chet]

I really appreciate the replies. Thank you all. I've learned a lot and
will be doing some experimenting based on your replies.

Chet