Posted: Sat Jan 07, 2006 7:03 pm
My Dell Inspiron 9100 automatically finds the second monitor. Right click on the desktop for "Display Properties", and pick "properties", "settings". Mine shows 2 monitors (one is half-toned when the second monitor is not attached).
Pick "advanced", "displays" to see the additional monitor options available. This is with the ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 video card that I have. I have four options. One shows the original laptop panel and is selected. Two other choices are "monitor" and the fourth option is "TV". When I have a monitor or projector attached, on of the "monitor" choices is also selected.
I use a projector that has 800 x 600 resolution for client presentations, and a 1024 x 768 monitor at my desk in the office. The laptop has no trouble handling the varying resolutions.
Please note: When you "extend Windows" as Niel mentions, the actual image that is handled by the video card extend from the corner of laptop window to the diagonally opposite corner of an imaginary rectangle that bounds both windows. You can easily verify this by doing a "print screen" when both screens are active and seeing that there is one large rectangle, not two adjacent ones. This is a minor inconvenience, but must be remembered when I am doing DataCAD work in front of clients using the projector. I have my toolbars and dialog boxes on the laptop, the drafting board on the projector. Occasionally, the mouse will drop into "no-man's land" off of both screens and must remember the relationship of the two screens on "display properties/settings" to know where to move the mouse to make it visible again.
This is my typical setup:
This is how I use it on site, the laptop image is the larger, the projector is the smaller (using 1024x768 here):
With the projector at 800x600:
Setup allows the alternate anywhere, top:
or corner (makes the "no-man's land" appear much larger):